An Open Letter to Anita Jain About
Matrimony and Mythology
In the March 30 online issue of
New York magazine appeared a young Indian-American
woman's first-person account of her single life in the city. In particular
she looks at the tension between the Indian tradition
of having parents select a spouse for their child and
the American tradition of having the child make this
decision.
Dear Anita,
I enjoyed your story about your
dating travails so much that I felt compelled to write
to you. I make this an open letter because, knowing me,
it's probably going to turn into an essay and I hope
that what would seem tendentious in a private document
can get plea-bargained down to ceremonious in a public
one.
It’s impressive the way you
balance the competing elements of your drama: the tug
of tradition and filial loyalty versus the tug of
modernity and self determination. The resulting story
of your romantic adventures and misadventures is, by
turns, fascinating, funny and moving. And the inclusion
of your photograph doesn't exactly hurt the interest
that your story is likely to excite among readers,
especially males.
I wonder sometimes if there isn't
a certain genius in the idea of an arranged marriage
(providing the two people are basically decent human
beings). It takes so much pressure
off them. They don't have to
torture themselves before, during and after the
marriage with wondering whether they made the right
choice, whether they got the best possible deal. They
don't come to the marriage bruised and battered from
all their previous skirmishes with members of the
opposite sex. Nor do they come to it with extravagant
expectations. Most young men and women would surely
enter into such an arrangement with emotions made up of
some mixture of resignation, resentment, trepidation
and panic. Things can only get better from that point
on. As they say on Wall Street, the downside has
already been priced-in. The parties are buying their
shares cheap and there's plenty of room on the upside.
Plus, they immediately have something important in
common with each other: they are both victims of
authoritarian parents. They can commiserate with each
other.
The very absence of torrid
passion in the beginning of such a relationship will
probably encourage a certain caution in their dealings
with each other, and caution is a cousin of respect. It
may be that establishing a habit of respect and
consideration for each other may be easier to do
before, rather than after, Cupid has turned them into
heart-shaped pin cushions.
I used to fly a lot between
Boston and Los Angeles and would take a shuttle van
home from LAX. It was always at night and I observed
that a curious intimacy often grew up in the forced and
random confinement of those quarters. (There's probably
an idea for a great dating business there, but that's
another matter.) I wonder if an arranged marriage would
not give its parties a similar feeling of, "Well,
we're thrown together here for a while, we might as
well make the best of it." It may also help that,
in a Hindu culture, there is always the release valve
of reincarnation: if things don't work out so well this
time, there's always the next go-round. Anyway, just
some thoughts. It may be too late for you to put the
jinn of American freedom back in the bottle and resign
yourself to an arranged marriage.
You tell a wonderful story and
it's as old as America (okay, so it's not that old, but
it's still a good story): the clash of old world and
new world values as the second generation tries to find
its bearings in the new land. You better watch out or
some studio will come sniffing around looking to buy
the movie rights to it. ("Yeah, think 'My Big Fat
Indian Wedding' or maybe 'Bend It Like B. B. King.'
We'll make her a guitar player instead of a
writer.") Let's hope they don't do that –
you're too good a writer.
It seems to be a fact that most
marriages are that in name only. I once asked my shrink
(years ago) how common she thought true marriage was,
that is a joining of mind and heart and soul and body
bent together on some shared purpose. She thought for a
moment and said, "About one in ten."
I was taking a subway from
Brooklyn to Manhattan a couple of months ago on a visit
to the city and couldn't help staring at a 40-ish
couple sitting nearby. They were dressed informally and
(I would guess) inexpensively but attractively. It was
hard to peg them socio-economically: bohemian perhaps
but not starving. There was something magnetic about
them. I stared at them like a man drinking at a desert
oasis. And then I realized what it was: they were
happy. They were so obviously in love with each other
and had been for a long time. How had they done it? Who
knows? Who cares? Someone did it. Someone made it past
all the barbed wire and land mines and snipers and
found the treasure and came back. That's the important
thing. It can be done. It's not a fairy tale. The sight
of it re-fueled me for another few years of searching.
But it can only be done by a very
few people apparently, and, for the rest of us, it
remains a fairy tale. Maybe it's better not to look for
something that is so elusive. That is the essence of
America, though, and it's hard to escape the contagion
of that gambling fever (or questing fervor, to put it
more nobly). It's probably impossible to prevent that
unrest from leaking into our domestic arrangements. But
it's a nice thought: coming home from the battles of
the day to a nice quiet home, with safety and security
and amicability, a small sheltered plot of land that is
not up on Wuthering Heights nor down in the Valley of
the Dolls. For most Americans, at least, this too is
probably a fairy tale.
Yet we have to pour out the
chaotic fragments of our lives into some sort of
container, and tales and stories and myths are the best
templates we have. They are doorways out of the terror
and tedium of this world into a parallel universe of
communal dreams, dreams that alternately torment us and
soothe us. Art is our compensation for the toil of
living. It's the only place where we can find events
that have the form and finish that gives us, for a
moment, a feeling of satisfaction and completion.
Marriage is part of that world of toil. Dramatically
satisfying, coherent marriages belong in that other
world, the world of stories about marriage, and the
more we can keep the two worlds distinct in our minds,
the more we can shield life from the iron rules of
drama, the better chance we'll have, perhaps, of
finding something like happiness in this one.
