Marriage Lines

It is 8 a.m. on a September Sunday in New Delhi. The garden below is still fresh and green before the heat of the day, and pigeons bill and coo on the air-conditioning unit outside the bedroom window. There is a discreet knock at the door, and a tray of ‘bed tea’ is silently placed beside us, accompanied by the morning papers. As I sip (tea with hot milk – an unfamiliar taste), I turn to my favourite section of the Hindustan Times, the ten pages of ‘Matrimonials’:

Alliance invited from Handsome & Well Educated Boy, High Status Industrialist/Business Class, Highly Placed Professional for 24/164 V B’ful, fair, slim, convented Engineer Daughter from High Status Affluent South Delhi Based Punjabi Family . . . Handsome Boy, Gursikh, Teetotaler, Non-Trimmer, B. Com 2 5/183 running family business with high income residing in own bungalow seeks proposal from really beautiful sober cultured homely educated girl from respectable high status family with religious values. Please send Bio-Data and photo if possible . . .

For some reason I find these urgent wants ads compulsive reading. But this is our first visit to India, and though I can read the words, I can’t read between the lines, as I could at home. The matrimonial world they hint at is fascinating and mysterious. So what a treat it was, back in England, to come across The Uncoupling, a touching yet wickedly funny portrait of a mature Indian marriage that had started out in just this way. Balu and Janaki are visiting their precious only son Ram and his wife, a modern young couple who have left Madras to settle in Norwich. And Ram, wanting his parents to make the most of their stay (and perhaps also hoping for a bit of a breather), has arranged a trip for them, a ‘European Kaleidoscope’ coach tour, which whisks them bewilderingly from Amsterdam along the Rhine and the Danube to Switzerland and back. The Allsights tour, with its relentlessly cheerful guide (‘Call me Thierry’), mind-numbing coach journeys, folklore evenings and forced camaraderie, is all too believable, but there is more to the story than that. As they settle uneasily into the first hotel room, a picture begins to emerge in flashback of Balu and Janaki’s marriage and their life back home in Madras, starting with the tragi-comic scene in which the young Balu agonizes over the 40-word advertisement for a bride which he has decided to place in The Hindu newspaper.

Balu had never thought that working on the wording of his advertisement would take so long . . . He had gone over the limit of ten words that he had allocated to himself, finding he needed the assistance of three or four more to arrive at a nearsatisfactory self-profile . . .Words were placed in margins and then brought out for trial runs. After some thought he decided that ‘sober with traditional values’ was more important as a wifely requirement than as an essential husbandly virtue, and the phrase was relegated for use in the latter half of the advertisement.

The resulting marriage has been a happy one, from Balu’s standpoint at least. ‘Traditional values’ have been upheld. Janaki has given unquestioning wifely support to Balu as he rises up the ladder to become Manager of the local branch of his accountancy firm. She has bowed to his determination to control every single small aspect of their lives. And she has put up with his rigidly conventional attitudes and his need to impress colleagues, friends and neighbours. But deep down in the apparently pliable Janaki runs an undertow of discontent, even of rebellion. Though she is nervous and shy at first, as the holiday progresses she surprises herself by her ability to get on with, and even impress, the other members of the tour group, including an anglicized Sikh couple who, with their drinking, racy jokes and tales of their emancipated daughters back in England, represent everything of which Balu disapproves. Balu is in for some surprises too. Nothing has prepared him for the crude and overt sexuality that he encounters in Europe, especially in Amsterdam. Even when he is trying to buy a cuckoo-clock for his brother-in-law in seemingly straitlaced Switzerland, he is offered an obscene, under-the-counter, tourist version. Still more disturbing is his own reaction. Balu has always considered himself far above the vulgarity of Perumal, his colleague back home, who brags of his wife’s wanton ways and watermelon breasts. But now Balu can’t get those watermelon breasts out of his mind. And, to his secret confusion, he begins to look at his demure wife with new eyes. The Uncoupling is a novel about liberation, but it is also a subtle study of the shifting currents, the small, everyday power struggles and compromises that make up most successful marriages. It would have been easy for Cauvery Madhavan to make fun of her two main characters, but though she made me laugh, her observation is so delicate and affectionate that I felt only understanding for their failings and sympathy for their vulnerability. For me she opened a new window on Indian family life, with its complex web of obligations and expectations, alliances and rivalries. When I go to India again, I shall look at the matrimonial ads in a slightly different way.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 3 © Hazel Wood 2004