See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur

Author:Valarie Kaur [Kaur, Valarie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

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Sharat and I lived together in New Haven for three years, running the Yale Visual Law Project. We treasured the work but were exhausted all the time. One summer night, he said that he was going to make me dinner. I came home to find our tiny apartment filled with delicious smells. I sat at the kitchen table, and he served us course after course. My “Book of Spells” painting was on the wall behind us. He had put it in a gold frame when I graduated, my real diploma.

“This is a culinary trip through our life together!” he exclaimed. It was a welcome break from talking about prisons.

Each course represented a beautiful memory—roasted garlic and bread from when we fell in love in Chicago, Mexicali chopped salad from a favorite café in Los Angeles, patatas bravas from a romantic restaurant in Boston, late-harvest sauvignon blanc from California wine country, and fresh berry tart with toasted nut crust from Rose Café in Venice Beach. He made everything from scratch. We had been together for six years now. In each course, I tasted our memories.

At the end of dessert, he kneeled down on one knee and asked me to marry him.

“Sure, someday,” I said. Until I realized that he was asking for real. Like, right now. This was him proposing. My heart leapt up. Joy flooded through me. My body said yes, but my mind said hold on. We had weathered so much pain from people who never wanted us married. I also had doubts about the whole institution. I thought of the Punjabi aunties sitting on the manjees in India, relaying story after story of pain. Marriage was a social and legal institution that had cast women as property and cemented traditional gender roles for centuries. Traditional Indian marriages had rituals like dowries and dolis, palanquins that literally “transferred” a woman from one family to another. During the wedding ceremony, the bride followed the groom around the fire or around the scripture. I was not going to follow. There was also the small matter that in the course of our scrappy artist-activist lives, Sharat and I had not saved any money for a wedding. I sat him down on the couch and interrogated him for an hour.

“What if we made it ours?” Sharat asked.

He knew how to talk to me. We pulled out paper and markers and began imagining our wedding. If we could make the wedding our own, then we could make marriage ours, too. We asked ourselves: When had we felt most at home in our bodies and at home in the world? What were the elements that made us feel that way? We wrote and dreamed and toasted and planned.

We made our wedding from scratch, out of the United States, far from the city, in the rain forest. It was a week of music and singing and dancing and feasting, weaving together rituals from Sikh and Hindu traditions. During the wedding ceremony, we walked together around the scripture side by side, hand in hand, by the roaring ocean and setting sun.

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