A Happy Arranged Marriage? You mus' be joking..!!!

‘Look at her. The way her mouth widens to reveal her wonderfully arranged teeth shrinking her eyes, while devouring the cake her husband offers her. Oh God!! She is terrific’

The first feeling that a wedding photograph of a beautiful girl in facebook elicits in me, is instantaneous envy. The envy is not something completely unfounded but it must be a disorder reserved only for males, to feel rejected even if you have made no attempt to apply for the position. The cheerful wedding selfies and the skillfully captured moments in the photographs do send a message to all the facebook spectators, that the girl is certainly living the best moments of her life and reveling in unparalleled happiness. But you never know until one of your close female friends get married that how difficult, marriages really are and how clueless these women are, at life altering moments such as these.

Recently, I had my colleague expressing with firm emphasis something that sounded like a Santhanam one-liner, ‘Campus-interview rejects and single people are similar. The first one is as unlikely to get a job as much as the second one will end up securing a happy marriage’.

Once women turn 24, they are slapped with a ‘over-aged female’ label and the parents begin to move like electrolyzed reactants inside a tank to finish the process of getting their daughters married. The prime criteria, is that the groom should belong to the exact sub-caste or division under which their family has been placed in the caste hierarchy even if the sub-caste has already been buried under seven layers in a particular community. A community, many a time, will have three or four sub-groups. Each sub-group shall form a caste. Each caste will have at least three sub-castes and each sub-caste will have even more divisions that may either be defined based on geography or languages that were associated with them many hundred years ago. This method of multi-layered distillation shall end up creating more difficulties such as a skewed sex ratio or a wide economic disparitiy among the competing families within the same division. Assuming that in a particular sub-caste that there are more well-to-do families, the concerned girl’s family, if relatively poor, will have to lose more in the ‘business transaction’ that is critical in executing an arranged Indian marriage. With lesser number of males to choose, there will be even lesser chances of getting a groom that matches at least ten percent of the girls’ expectations.

Even if the caste question is resolved and the economic feasibility of the project favourably defined, the parents do not skip any chance to obtain the ‘go-ahead’ signal from the most important ‘stakeholders’ in the project – no, not the boy or the girl- the astrologers. There are a proliferating number of astrologers who are completely oblivious to the personal lives of the boy and the girl, but are entrusted with the responsibility of deciding their next fifty or sixty years.

’Marry within six months or you will have to wait for seven years’

 ‘A love marriage for this boy will surely end up in a divorce’

‘Your man is located 150 kilometres east from your house and if you do not marry this guy, you will never get married in your life’

‘If you marry the guy of this star, you will lose all your wealth’

Please do not conclude that either I should be an atheist or a Periyar follower because I do believe, one hundred percent in the powers of these fore-tellers. Every time I have chosen a girl from a list of photographs my parents have shown to me, our family astrologer has never failed to reject her with only a cursory glance at her horoscope.  Atheism, shit.

Please don’t be led into believing that the aforementioned incident is purely personal and please be aware that I am the fifth guy in the gang of my six friends who have had this complaint. Needless to say, I had a female friend who used to complain that every guy the astrologer recommended to her resembled her father in his shape.

I have heard an even more atrocious incident about a middle class girl who had to choose a guy over another one, only because, only his family was ready to delay the marriage by six months since all the affordable marriage halls had been taken during that span.

To sum up, in India, anyone can decide the lives of the boy and the girl, even if it could be the unknown astrologer, or the owner of the marriage hall or even a mythical king, born thousands of years ago who allotted the clan their present place in the caste hierarchy, but certainly not the boy and the girl.

As I ruminate over all these issues surrounding a marriage, and when I take a look at the same photograph of that beautiful woman, my envy now looks certainly mitigated. But there is more as to why I feel less envious. I know very less about that beautiful woman, who is actually the best friend of my friend.

As I ponder about her, I get reminded of one totally random incident about this woman that my friend told me long back.

The woman, in her high school, had been in a romantic relationship with a guy and her parents had found it out. They had taken great pains to break their relationship and had succeeded. My friend had been present at her house when all this had happened and the girl had refused to eat for more than three days. He told me that her mother never once had spoken with her during the period.

After a long time, when she had broken the silence, she uttered the following.

“Dear, please complete your studies, land up in a job and we promise we will get a wonderful husband for you in the future”.

She reportedly, had grown out of that phase and moved on to join one of the most prestigious engineering institutions in the country. She currently works as a System Analyst in an IT company who was a bright student in her college and is currently being paid twice than what I earn right now. It seems she has had plenty of proposals for marriage from many of her college friends and colleagues but she had turned them down because of one reason. She believed in her parents’ judgement and they could not fail her.

One day, my friend showed me a WhatsApp message sent by her, a few days before her marriage.

‘I do not know whether to call this off or not. I don’t know why I consented to this marriage. I don’t want this marriage to happen. I feel like killing myself’.