Since its been so long, the updates will be quick and then straight to a story!
- As mentioned, we have moved to a new flat...and we love it! Its a little bit closer to my work (so the commute is only about 35 mins each way now), in a nice quiet residential neighborhood but close to the best market of Delhi (I'm biased a bit). We are on the top floor with a HUGE terrace, two rooms, a bathroom (with a tub and a wall of mirrors, very rare in middle class India I think?) and a big kitchen (also rare - usually kitchens are quite small - perfect for servants). Another big plus is that there are windows in all the rooms (and again...rare in India!) Our terrace is now fully decked out with newly purchased plants and bamboo furniture. Unfortunately we keep killing the plants because the temperature has reached well over 100 F and they are all roasting to death (like me....we have no AC yet)
- A few holidays have passed - Holi (the festival of colors) which we celebrated at a university campus with other crazy young people and relatively little groping for which the holiday is famous, Ram's birthday (which brings with it a 9 day fast that of course we DIDN'T participate in), and at least a trillion others. Good Friday is coming up this week, and they even celebrate that!
- Work is going well. I have negotiated my way into having alternating Saturdays off (!!!!) in order to take a few weekend trips here and there.
- In terms of work, things are going well. Changes are happening - in my programs (for the good) and in the organization in general (for the good and the not so good). The most dramatic thing that has taken place recently is that one of the communities that we work in was completely demolished by the government in preparation for the Commonwealth Games. They are "beautifying" the city, which basically means using child labor and under-paid workers to disrupt the city to build new stadiums and roads, and bull-doze all the slums that might (or might not) be visible and where most of the laborers (and children) live. The repercussions for the residents are huge, of course, but things keep going and people keep surviving.
(here are a few pictures of some kids on demolition day playing with rubbish they found in the piles of what used to be their homes...)
- MY PARENTS ARE COMING TO VISIT!!!
Thats enough updates...for now....I double pink-promise to be a bit better. I can't keep up with all the things that happen all the time - there is too much to observe all the time and too much to take in constantly....but once my parents are here, I'll have my new camera and I can at the VERY LEAST update you with images!
...So now a story...about an arranged marriage in Bangalore.
We have a friend named Shilpa. Shilpa is THE MOST liberated Indian woman we (or anyone else in India) has ever met. She drinks and smokes and parties and has love affairs and sex stories (a 3 year long story which she was in the middle of when this whole mess started)...all with no qualms whatsoever. She is very genuine, unafraid of being who she is and doing what she wants. She's the type of woman that could approach the sketchiest of wine and beer shops in Delhi (which means any of them because they are ALL sketchy) and with confidence push her way through a sea of liquor-hungry men (and not a single other woman) and demand enough alcohol to get the whole shop drunk, and walk out without even thinking twice.
Shilpa's very conservative Hindu parents have been trying for years to get her married. She finally agreed.
How arranged marriage generally happens (as far as I can tell or at least in this case) is like this...
FIRST the parents save for years and years and stock up on all necessary 'equipment'. In South India that means GOLD (they consume more than half of the world's gold or something) and SILK (sarees of course). So Shilpa's mom, having only 1 child and a girl at that, has been putting many years, and a lot of money, into stocking up the best of wedding paraphernalia.
NEXT, even before getting your uber-liberated daughter to agree on even the idea of getting married, the parents contact a very official marriage broker. It becomes his responsibility to find suitable matches - according to religion, background, caste, profession, skin color, education, etc. And then....the eligible bachelors (having to do nothing themselves except exist) are brought one by one in front of the bride-to-be (assuming she has by this point accepted her fate) until she finally resigns and picks one (if she's smart like Shilpa, she picks the one who will interfere least with her current lifestyle, ie the most passive of the bunch)
AND THEN...the wedding. Again, the responsibility rests entirely on the bride's family. They have to arrange the venue, find the priests (and the priest's many assistants), hire a decorator, finalize a caterer (in Shilpa's family's case pure vegetarian, no alcohol), tailor clothing (also for the groom and his family), throw parties (engagement, henna, prayer, etc) and even rent a bus to transport the groom's family from the village to the city (again in Shilpa's case since the groom's family was from Mysore, three hours away).
NOW...the wedding itself lasts about 4 or 5 days (I think it could be longer, but Shilpa being Shilpa and silently rebelling until the very end, did as little as possible for it still be considered a wedding).
Sunday night was 'mendhi night' - which is basically the equivalent to a bachelorette's party as best as I can tell (again breaking tradition, Shilpa allowed men at her wanna-be bachelorette's party...men being Francesco). The bride and all her girlfriends get together for henna. The bride gets henna all the way up both her whole arms and as far as she wants up her feet and legs. Her henna should be the most intricate and takes about 3 hours to apply (!!!!). The rest of the women generally get more simple designs just on the front and backs of their hands - although, as is typical of girls, competition kicks in and whoever has the best henna wins - I noticed that its better if you go AFTER the bride because then the standards are higher. If you go before the bride (like I did) you never know what you're missing out on - as if being a white girl with henna isn't enough to make people laugh....try being a white girl with not very good henna. There are a few tips and tricks and myths about henna.
- The higher your body temperature, the darker the henna gets and the darker the henna gets the more you love your husband or husband-to-be. (The feminist in me sees big problems with this myth - why can't it be how much your husband loves you? And the practical side of me also asks, what does dark henna have to do with love to begin with?) Tricks to make your henna darker....1. Drink chai. 2. As the henna is drying, warm your hands over the heat made by roasting a mixture of
cloves and cinnamon.
- If the bride wants and the mendhi artists are capable (which any artist would be or surely they wouldn't be hired for such an important event), the name of the groom is hidden in the bride's intricate henna. This is again supposed to prove the wife's devotion to the husband. My theory is that it creates a type of icebreaker, so that the husband and wife, on their first night together (and probably the first time they are in the same place without any other distractions or family) they have something to occupy themselves to overcome their discomfort.
- Another privilege of mendhi night is that since your hands are completely coated in ooey, gooey henna, which you dare not mess up, someone is in charge of feeding you. Since Shilpa wasn't strict enough to disallow male guests, Francesco was there, to feed me the endless food, and give me drinks, and basically anything else I wanted. A few of her uncles were
making offers to feed me too, but I legitimately was allowed to behave like a spoiled princess and Francesco could do nothing but oblige.
The next big step of a South Indian wedding is the reception - thats right, the reception comes BEFORE the actually wedding ceremony. This is because marriage halls are rented for 24 hour time frames which start around noon - so since the reception is at night and the ceremony in the morning, they have to switch things up.
Contrary to what you might picture as an Indian wedding, South Indian receptions are BORING. I'm used to flashy lights and loud, annoying, un-rhythmic bhangra music of North India, the mobs of men dancing and sweating, the groups of women giggling and making excuses not to join on the dance floor, the mixing and mingling and undercover alcohol - South Indian receptions, on the other hand, are quite sober. Basically, the guests put on their best silk saris, wait in a big line with their families and friends, and parade one group at a time across stage to greet the (not-yet) married couple. You give them a gift (usually money), pause for the cameraman to take a picture, pose with your most serious face, go to the kitchen to eat, and then leave. No dancing. No singing. No sneaking alcohol. No disco lights and bhangra music. And most disappointingly, NO WHITE HORSE. Grooms in North India come to the wedding reception riding regally on a white horse, along with all their friends, family, family friends, neighbors, friends of neighbors, people they pick up on the street, in a big procession behind them. Its the stuff of fairy tales - princes (or creepy Indian men) on white horses coming to meet their true-love (who they've never laid eyes on before). Love at first sight and all that cheesy stuff. Not in South India. Just standing on a stage...
Last but not least is the ceremony - which again is rather long and drawn out and slightly boring. Before, during and after there were all kinds of other pujas (prayers) as well - to ensure the gods were pleased and the stars were inline and this and that and the other. The thing that struck me as odd was that the whole thing was planned according to 'auspicious' timing - basically according to the stars and the astrologist who reads the stars (also hired by the bride's family), one puja had to occur before 3:00 on the specific day. But the groom's family was running late and it was soon 2:45 and his mother and father weren't in sight (or in Bangalore). So they started without them - Shilpa and her mom and dad on one side, the groom and his....uncle and aunt on the other. Apparently its more inauspicious to start after 3:00 than it is to have someone pretend to be the groom's parents.
In all this (meaning the trip to Bangalore but also in general during our time in India as its hard to go one hour without some mention of marriage from someone, somehow) we heard a lot of theories about arranged marriage. People claim it has a logic, and even though Shilpa was an uninvolved bride (and even a rebellious one at times) she used to be the one who could rationally argue FOR arranged marriage (not to say she ever really WANTED it for herself). Basically she said that arranged marriage is just a way to narrow down the selection based on social capital. Given the vast number of people in India and the strict rules of social interaction between genders, it is close to impossible to choose ONE man for every ONE woman. It helps when each are involved in the same social setting - university or school or college or work - and then the couple can arrange for themselves. (Usually when asked if they had an arranged marriage or a love marriage, these couples will proudly reply, "both" as in first they fell in love, but then the parents approved). Otherwise, it is where parents (and marriage brokers) come in – they have the job of narrowing it down. It should be someone from the same background (READ: caste - although technically illegal it is still the biggest match-making criteria and if castes are unequal, even the pujas at the wedding will be affected) so that the couple-to-be naturally possesses similar views on raising children, spending/saving money, education, taking care of older relatives, and socializing with friends. The potential husband and wife would have been raised in a similar way and matched according to these strict criteria rather than 'love'. Of course, nothing is as black and white as that in India, and there are many qualifications OTHER than caste – sub-caste, village, profession, etc. – but the bottom line is matching social capital.
There are other logics that I have heard as well, but none as shrouded in academic reasoning. The funniest one being that an arranged marriage purposefully starts at the lowest point (not knowing each other) so that the relationship can only improve from there (I suppose as opposed to a western 'love' marriage that starts at the highest point - love - and declines into divorce and lawsuits).
This is certainly not the case with Shilpa. Super-free Shilpa's arranged marriage went terribly wrong very quickly. Within one week of her marriage, her new in-laws paid a surprise visit to her house. They pulled her aside and instructed her on how to crush up pills to mix with their son's juice every morning as they had been doing for the past 3 years without his knowledge. Apparently Shilpa's brand-new husband has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and is being treated secretly (so that he doesn't even know), with no hopes of recovering any time soon. All the doctors who have been consulted claim that he will be on medication for the rest of his life and that he will continue to be unresponsive and need constant care.
Shilpa is filing for an annulment or divorce. In India its reason enough that he is so unresponsive from his medication that he is impotent BUT...hopefully she will sue the parents for misrepresentation and deceit and anything else she can think of. And hopefully, not only because all her mom's hopes and dreams were spent (in hundreds of thousands of rupees) on this one marriage, but also because she might finally understand a general downside of arranged marriage to begin with, Shilpa can return to her 3-year old love story and her independence.
That my friends is a story of arranged marriage - gone wrong - and somehow incredibly right again. Go Shilpa! FREEEEEEEEDOOOOMMMM!
