Sandy Verma

Part One: Before

1.

April 1988

Bombay

Meena had never told anyone but she found the phrase ‘arranged marriage’ funny. It was funny to assume that marriages could be arranged the way flowers were arranged and showpieces were arranged in a cabinet, the way forks and knives were arranged next to each other, when life had proved that was often not the case. Ummi and Papa could not be arranged in a cabinet. They would not look good in any decoration.

But now Papa was supposed to pick someone out of a bunch and arrange him next to Shehnaz.

There were flaws in this system: outliers spoken of only in whispers, daughters who were not talked about except through bitten lips. A daughter who married for love insulted her father. She had rejected his right to choose her husband.

That summer, Meena and Pallavi held such secrets on their tongue, fresh and exciting like ice, which was also forbidden — ice made throats go sore in Bombay’s unpredictable weather. Meena learnt that Banerjee Uncle and Dolly Aunty had a love marriage when she overheard Dolly Aunty ask Ummi to teach her how to cook meat curries for her Bengali husband.

Ummi’s face acquired a pinched look. ‘Sometimes I forget that you are not a Bengali. This is what happens when you have a love marriage. Things don’t match.’

Even Pallavi hadn’t known that her parents had had a love marriage. But now the girls understood why Dolly Aunty did not wear a bindi like Bengali women were supposed to. Why Uncle wore jeans. Why, when they looked at each other, there seemed to be something between them.

Not that Meena thought that Shehnaz should have a love marriage. Not at all. She knew that her sister would marry someone who would walk out of Papa’s marriage register because she was a good daughter. All these things Meena knew, good sensible time-tested things that wouldn’t succumb to a moment of passion, to the stupidity of the young and the impressionable. It was very hard for anyone to make an impression on Papa. Ummi had tried and it could be safely said that Ummi had failed.

Lately Meena was beginning to suspect that she wasn’t as good a daughter as her sister. Whispers from the gap between the curtains at her window felt like ice in Bombay’s weather. It wasn’t fair that the posters of the movie were plastered all over the wall of the building opposite her window, so many posters of that delicious actor, like a hundred apples in front of Eve.

Meena tried to be good. She drew the curtains to shut out the luminescence of those brown eyes, the eyes of Satan that showed her, every time, who she really was.

#

When Pallavi saw the poster on the wall opposite their building, she stopped and her jaw went slack. Meena’s heart froze. She knew Pallavi, she knew that the handsome actor wouldn’t be hers anymore, that Pallavi would take him and make something out of him that was outside of her, something that belonged to everyone else.

Pallavi’s eyes strolled over his biceps, his shoulders, onto the patch of hair peeking over his black vest.

‘He’s cute,’ she rolled her tongue over her lips.

Meena kept her eyes on the ground even though her eyelids were burning with the force of the seduction exuding from the actor’s face.

‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Looks like a boy. Like a Mills and Boons boy. See, See.’

Meena turned her back to the wall and placed a foot on the posters, her slippers on the actor’s face.

‘I prefer Amitabh Bachchan,’ she said.

But Pallavi made a tchuching sound and Meena knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop her friend. She searched the posters until she found the Hindi script for the name of the movie but neither of them knew what the word ‘Qayamat’ meant. Meena wanted to tell her to stop, she wanted to tell her that she didn’t want to know what the actor’s name was and when they could see the movie. She just wanted to keep him to herself, like an idea, a whisper full of possibilities.

‘But isn’t ‘Qayamat’ an Urdu word? Don’t you know its meaning?’

Meena shook her head. She had heard Anwar Chacha and Zuby Chachi use the word in so many ways that it could mean anything from difficulty to death, an expression of anger or surprise or perhaps something else entirely.

‘Shouldn’t your Ummi know? Why don’t you ask her?’

You didn’t talk about things that mattered to you. You protected them like delicate flowers because the world was always in search of things to pluck, things to scatter away in the wind. But Pallavi never understood this. She called the videowallah and when he said that he hadn’t heard of the movie either, the phone dangled in her hand like a cut chord, like she couldn’t believe that she had got nothing.

Meena pulled her friend away. They chased each other around playgrounds, jumped over puddles, climbed over parapets, rang doorbells and dashed away. Round and round they went in Gemini Co-operative Housing Society and the watchman didn't pay them any attention; they were just girls in frocks. In Pallavi’s giggles, in the familiar shade of the banyan tree and the embrace of its vines, Meena hoped she would forget the boy from the movie.

But Pallavi wasn’t the sort to forget something that attractive.

The next morning, the handsome actor rose like a ripple in the class of 4B. One moment they were learning about simple equations and the mutiny of 1857, then the bell rang for lunch, and Pallavi announced to everyone that there was a new Bollywood movie in town. That its actor was so handsome that it was hard to believe that he was a Bollywood star.

‘He looks like a boy from a posh Juhu college. Uff! I’m in love!!’

A quantity of girls shrunk away from Pallavi’s proclamation, girls whose faces had mastered expressions of shame and disgust from their mother’s faces. Meena jerked Pallavi’s frock the way Papa pulled the hem of her frock but Pallavi, of course, did not know what that meant.

‘A breath of fresh air. You have to see him! Your world will change!’

The girls turned away, plaits were flicked, mouths twisted.

Later in the playground they were playing house-house but Pallavi was incorrigible, and she told everyone that her ‘husband’ unlike theirs, had not come home from his office and wasn’t reading the newspaper in front of the television. He was dancing in circles around the drawing room. His eyes were brown and his hair was wavy and he wore jeans and so did she.

‘But that is not what happens,’ a girl said.

Pallavi ignored the girl and continued to play. She swung around the jungle gym with her imaginary husband. He gave her a rose and she pressed it to her chest.

Meena joined Pallavi in this ridiculous fantasy because anyone who saw them would know that it was not real. They would know that they were pretending and therefore it was okay — everyone knew that girls were allowed to pretend and dream as much as they wanted to before they got married.

#

They played within the building compound after school and on weekends and holidays until it got so hot that the rotting fish demanded their attention and respect. Koli fishermen used the beach nearby to salt and dry their fish, which emanated a stench so rancid that a local nursing home held it responsible for waking coma patients from a vegetative state. The residents of Gemini housing society were olfactorily neutered, but on some afternoons the sunlight seemed to emanate a fishy stench. Even birds fainted and flopped to the ground.

The girls shut themselves in the bedroom to try on Shehnaz’s clothes. Shehnaz was nineteen and she wore baggy jeans and sleeveless tops and salwar suits, which were things that they were not allowed to wear yet. The girls put on these clothes and pretended to be housewives and mothers and college girls and secretaries. A faint fishy stink filtered through the curtains, it weaved through Shehnaz’s clothes, perched in the dark protected insides of her cupboard.

Meena tried to copy Pallavi but she bumped her knee against the bed. Pallavi sashayed in the passage between the twin beds, she stuck out her hip like a model and her hair danced behind her like a Sunsilk shampoo commercial. Pallavi was fair, she smelt of imported things brought back in the silk lining of Delsey suitcases on Lufthansa flights with a stopover at Heathrow.

Meena looked like Papa. People were often surprised to learn that she was a Pathan. Bubbles of doubt would rise in people’s eyes as though her brown skin had broken their dreams of exotic deserts where the mountains were cold and treacherous and the women were beautiful.

Her sister looked like Ummi, tall and thin and with the kind of complexion that evoked images of rose-flavoured milk. You will have the choice of grooms for your older one, society aunties would often tell Ummi, in pink raptures of prospective matrimonial delight.

‘What’s in the box?’ Pallavi pointed to the cardboard carton at the foot of Shehnaz’s cupboard with the word ‘Benzer’ blazoned across it in deep maroon. ‘Is that the Benzer? The clothing store in town?’

In all the things that were supposed to be secret within a family, this was the most secret. The search for Shehnaz’s husband was confined within Papa’s marriage register, sanctified by that tone of voice that had always defined their boundaries and limits, beyond which no daughter of his could venture. Meena was not supposed to tell Pallavi that her parents had started looking for a groom.

‘We can’t touch that.’

‘Why?’

‘I told you.’

‘You didn’t. You’re lying! Tell me.’

‘It’s—it’s Shehnaz‘s boy seeing costume.’

Pallavi’s eyes went wide and a thin layer of saliva wet her lips.

‘Boy-seeing? Costume? Do you mean what she wears when a suitor comes to see her for an arranged marriage?’

Pallavi’s face was shining. The curtains fluttered with a salty stink but beyond the windows were a hundred posters of a handsome actor and his chocolate brown eyes. He spoke with the silence of his gaze, he whispered to her: Go on. Open up.

The Benzer box was opened, the salwar-kameez was unfurled, in shocking pink and brilliant fuchsia. They spread it on the bed and marvelled at the sequinned peacock embroidered on its front. The skirt of the kameez was long and flowing like an English gown, the salwar was tight like a trouser and the sheer dupatta had silver tassels hanging from its end. When Pallavi said that Shehnaz would look like a princess in this dress, Meena’s heart melted. Papa had just said that the dress was ‘appropriate’.

There was a stack of bio-datas hidden in the locker, she told Pallavi. Bio-datas of boys. Bullet points of name and age and sect and occupation. And photographs. Some of them had sent colour photographs.

Pallavi pulled her sleeve in excitement.

Their roles were reversed, normally it was Pallavi who jumped into things and Meena who hung on to her sleeve. When she pulled her sleeve again, Meena agreed to steal the photos.

Jubilant sounds of cold meat dropped in hot oil greeted Meena outside. Ummi was frying a batch of kebabs to be frozen until the next time a boy came to see Shehnaz. Ummi’s back was to her and she worked fast but there was something different in the way she moved, as if each circle of meat that she dropped into the oil meant something, as if she whispered as she shaped the balls, as if there was a pause just before she pulled them out of the oil. Meena almost forgot what she was supposed to be doing as she watched Ummi work.

Then Ummi moved and Meena bolted.

Ten minutes later they were peering at images of boys with shy smiles and sullen expressions, their hair styled in quiffs and pompadours. They imagined Shehnaz in the peacock salwar-kameez with alternating boys. In Meena’s mind they melded into one, one dimpled boy with brown eyes. Her sister was beautiful, she deserved someone as handsome as the boy from the mystery movie.

As if she read her mind, Pallavi made a face at the photos, ‘These boys look nothing like the actor of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak.’

‘You don’t even know what that name means.’

‘Does Shehnaz like any of these boys?’

But Meena didn’t tell her that Shehnaz hadn’t even looked at the photographs. That her sister had plugged the Walkman back in her ears, she had blown her pink bubble-gum and it popped on her face like a slap.

‘You are just nine years old,’ Shehnaz told her to shut her up. ‘Why do you care about such things?’

‘Almost ten, Didi!’

‘Yes. Be ten. Be ten for as long as you can.’

Usually her speech was fast and flighty, but Shehnaz’s voice had gone slow, her words seemed to drag behind each other. Her shoulders had sagged as though the weight of being nineteen was pressing her down.

No one looked like themselves in such photographs, Meena told Pallavi. Shehnaz’s photograph, for example, was taken in the studio and in it, she was wearing a sari, her hair was tied in a demure ponytail. In that photograph she looked like the sort of girl who never wore jeans or listened to pop music. Like she hadn’t won the sports cup for the school or represented the district in badminton – although Papa had told Shehnaz not to mention the badminton.

‘Why not! Why can’t she say anything about badminton?’ Ummi cried.

‘It’s about being careful,’ Papa said. ‘About knowing what to say and when. Not only in a marriage but also in life.’

Pallavi flopped onto her stomach and the nimbus of photographs on the mattress rose and fell. The smells of fried meat made their mouth water and they gulped. Their stomachs growled and they ignored it.

Pallavi twirled a lock of hair around her finger and bit it until it was a tight black line across her cheek. She spit it out and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

‘Isn’t your sister too young to be married? Just nineteen, isn’t she?’

There was no point in explaining things to Pallavi. Pallavi did not get what it meant to be in a system, to be in the depth of things that kept you solid and secure, scaffolded by the safety of numbers. She did not know what it meant to be a good daughter, what it meant to be a good father.

Meena collected the photographs and replaced the dress in its box. A boy was supposed to come to see her sister that weekend.