As a new daughter-in-law to a Telegu- Brahmin-settled-in-Bangalore-family, it didn’t take her too long to find herself in a situation that made her miss her dreams. After about five days of marrying the only NRI son of the proud couple, she decided it was an ideal time to get that haircut her dad never allowed, saying it was among the pleasures, that comes with being married, after of course the husband permitted. The husband, a scrawny 25 year old, found her pictures, around a year ago on a matrimonial website and set his eyes on her. After convincing his folks that he was old enough to be married and attain himself the greater joy of holding a family citizenship in Texas, he prepared himself for the marriage.
The engagement happened rather traditionally with most of the rituals performed to the best possible extent and convenience after being collective subjects to altered trends in tradition and in the absence of the groom to be. In fact her met her for the first time on the day he arrived, at the airport to get married in the coming week.
His mother had spent most of her life as a housewife obsessing with cleanliness and a dust free home. She never ventured out that much into the world where women were becoming pilots and smoking. So most things came to her as a surprise, including the fact that I, her husband’s brother’s daughter, could and was allowed to drive. This surfaced when she expressed how hurt she was for days and how morally wrong it was for the bride to be to drive herself and her folks and a few others to the engagement. Women don’t drive in the presence of men and absence of a pressing emergency where the driving ability of the woman could be put to use. But for a woman who was going to become the wife in the next eight months, it’s a matter of Brahminhood at stake. Also its okay to wear sleeveless, when you are abroad or beneath a jacket and its okay to wear three fourths when you have walk in the beach. It’s a social crime for a woman who is of marriageable age to team up a sleeveless top with a skirt or three fourths, because people are going to talk. And she, my cousin’s wife didn’t take too long to figure the high level projection in her mother-in-law. Actually it took her four and a half days to do so.
Its like a done thing to visit relatives and speak over and over again about the marriage and the wedding and the gifts and the food and the child bearing plans, never mind the couple don’t even have an opportunity to do the needful to reproduce because there are enough rituals to do till late night and early hours of the morning. So day four and the couple religiously get dressed and come down stairs to the blessings of the in-laws so day’s meeting and greeting go smooth and she made the grave mistake of mentioning to her in-laws that she would on her way back get herself a haircut. Among the consequences of such a declaration were a endless lecture on Indian Brahmin woman and length of their hair and the social importance of the same, the modernization in today’s woman, a minor contribution through 20 minutes of weeping from the mother-in-laws for not having in her daughter-in –law what she spent her life expecting, a small misunderstanding and a conclusion between the newly weds and another round of all of the above.
Four and half days later, after what would typically encompass a best selling episode in a soap on Indian prime time television, she stands married more to the Brahmin family than her NRI husband.