Kavita Daswani

For Matrimonial Purposes


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       For Matrimonial Purposes

      KAVITA DASWANI

       Copyright

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      HarperFiction

      A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Kavita Daswani 2003

      Kavita Daswani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007160587

      Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007387908 Version: 2016-10-03

       Dedication

      To Mummy and Papa,

      for teaching me humor and humility.

      To Sunita, Ranju, Sanam, Mansha and Sohana,

      a family that I am profoundly proud to be a part of.

      And especially to my exceptional husband Nissim,

      who made me believe that my words have worth, and our gorgeous son Jahan, who moved me to write as he lay in my belly. As long as I have you both, my life is blessed.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Dedication

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Part Three

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Epilogue

       Acknowledgment

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

PART ONE

       Chapter One

      The normal religious marriage was and still is arranged by the parents of the couple, after much consultation, and the study of omens, horoscopes and auspicious physical characteristics … (w)hile a husband should be at least twenty a girl should be married immediately before puberty.

      The Wonder That Was India by A. L. Basham

      My grandmother was married off two days shy of her tenth birthday. My mother found a husband when she was twenty. I thus reckoned that if every generation increased by a decade the acceptable age for marriage, I should have become a wife by thirty.

      But at thirty-three, I was nowhere close to being married. And it was this that brought much consternation to all, tainting the joy and inciting hitherto suppressed family politics, at the wedding of my twenty-two-year-old cousin, Nina.

      I was at a family wedding in Bombay, the city where I was born and had spent most of my life. My parents and two brothers still lived here, in the same house that I knew as a child, a house conveniently