Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [8]
She was nearly twenty, a few months into her bachelor of commerce studies. But why, her father wanted to know, delay groom-hunting for two more years until she received her B. Comm.? It was therefore decided that while he wore himself out in search of a worthy "boy," she was to resume attending the English conversation classes the American held in his apartment on weekends. Good English equals good match. He was willing to dig into his savings to pay the American's fees because if any misfortune was to befall her mythical husband, she could help out by tutoring school pupils. English-language skills would always be in demand.
"What husband, Baba?" Anjali protested, though she was pleased to have his blessing to attend the weekend classes. "You haven't even started looking, and you're worrying he'll be disabled or destitute!" This was as close as her father could come to admitting the horrible mistake he had made in hand-picking Sonali's husband. In the Bose family, a married woman forced by circumstances to hold a job to make ends meet was a tragedy. A divorced single mother supporting herself and her four-year-old daughter by working long days as an office typist was a catastrophe.
Mr. Bose went back to his nightly pegs of whiskey, ignoring her. Anjali toted up her assets and liabilities in the marriage market. Unlike Sonali, she was tall and slim, and under favorable light and clothing, pleasant looking—no, make that passably good looking. On the minus side, she lacked accomplishments such as singing, dancing, and sewing, traditionally expected of bridal candidates. She was also stubborn, headstrong, and impulsive, and by middle-class Gauripur standards, inappropriately outgoing. Those were correctible or at least concealable failures. The one flaw that couldn't be overcome was her eye color: greenish hazel. Her mother prayed for her pale eyes to turn black. Black hair, black eyes, fair complexion, sharp nose, and thin lips were unassailable proof of ethnic purity, whereas brownish hair and light eyes hinted at hanky-panky with a European in some long-ago time and place. Anjali reminded her mother that Sonali's long-lashed black eyes had fetched a lecherous cad who paid no child support and no alimony.
To marry her off was her father's Hindu duty: Anjali accepted that. Given her willful personality, he was eager to marry her off before she sullied her reputation and disgraced the whole family: she understood that too. She couldn't talk about her wants and fears with her parents, but she knew when to humor and when to defy them.
The matchmaking campaign began casually. Her father might come home from the office saying, "Took tea with Mr. Pradip Sen this afternoon. He's looking for someone for his son." Meaningful pause. "Anjali, you remember the Sens, no?" And she might drop what she was doing, which couldn't be much, since she was fairly useless in the kitchen, and say, "I trust you're not talking of Buck Tooth Sen. Good luck!" Little tests like that, easily deflected. And her father would shoot back, "Sen is good family. Everyone is remembering Mr. Pradip Sen's maternal grandmother's brother, just a boy, was hanged by damn Britishers on Andaman Islands." The formalities of matchmaking were conducted in English in the Bose household. Over breakfast Mr. Bose might linger on the page of marriage ads in the local Bangla paper, checking out the boys. "Promising lad, engineering, awaiting U.S. Green Card." The newspaper photo was reduced from a visa-size, visa-posed grainy black-and-white, rather insulting to her estimation of her prospects. She thought, They actually think this clerk-in-waiting is worthy of me? "Shall I drop this young chap a line?" her father would ask, and Anjali, feeling more like Angie, would reply, "You do that and I'm out the door, thank you very much." They sparred and chuckled. Their girl had self-respect, which the parents considered a good thing; she was also a little willful, which was not.
Angie wrote to Sonali that things at home were much as usual. Grumbling, threats, entreaties, criticism,