A Convergence of Solitudes by Anita Anand

Author:Anita Anand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Published: 2022-04-30T22:20:50+00:00

1951

It was twilight, weeks after Diwali, and there were tea lights on top of the wall around her parents’ new house. Hima sat on a stool on the terraced roof in her beaded red-chiffon sari, lulled by the sounds of her two aunties’ voices singing as they drew on her hands with henna. Life was going to be very different soon; this thought repeated itself like a mantra, and she felt shivers of excitement, trepidation, and also the sense that she had won something — the right to pick her own husband, silly as that sounded, even to herself. Suddenly there were male voices competing with her aunties, and the bright loud noise of percussion instruments and horns. Sunil’s family had arrived. She smiled as she saw him arrive on a white horse, dressed in the new white khurta and pyjamas they had bought with her dowry money, a turban with a peacock feather and a curtain of beads in front of his face. Of course, she understood that tradition dictated that he was not supposed to have seen his bride before today. But what were they thinking, putting him on a horse and half-blinding him!

“Go on now,” her aunts told her. “Go down to him. Time to get married.”

She took her time, stepping carefully so as not to tread on the gold embroidered hem of her sari. She arrived in the courtyard as he disembarked from the horse. They were both given garlands of flowers and they placed these around each other’s necks, smiling broadly now like children.

They were to be married right there in her parents’ garden that cool evening in December. There were two hundred guests, half from Sunil’s family. As Hima sat on the dais, her head covered by her veil, she listened to her father negotiate with the pundit to shorten the ceremony, to go easy on the mantras, have them walk around the fire four times rather than seven. Hima knew that her father was not religious but suspected something else was at play: he was not enthralled with Sunil, and especially not with his family, whom he put up in servants’ quarters for the night; the servants themselves were sent to a hotel. As she sat waiting, she considered her dowry, which he had given to her directly, in cash — with which she’d bought her red-chiffon sari and gold jewellery and Sunil’s new clothes — and in stocks: Tata Steel, associated cement shares, mining companies, the cheque and the certificates clearly in her name. Her sisters and brothers milled about, close enough that she could hear their conversation as she sat there in silence, waiting for the ceremony to begin. They were having a discussion, but it seemed they all agreed with each other; to Hima it seemed she was listening to one voice, rather than six.

“When you have a Western marriage like Hima and Sunil, you are basically crazy in love, on top of the world, and you have nowhere to go in your life but down, because that’s what happens as reality sets in.

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