the Great Official Husband-Hunt, as I had come to call it, was well under way. I had been here for several days, and there had been some talk of this boy and that. Tonight, my mother had spotted a real-life prospect.
I turned to look at the man, and I was struck by the extreme shininess of his hair, as if he had emptied an entire bottle of Vitalis oil on to it. He also had one eyebrow. Well, not strictly one eyebrow, but two that merged in the middle. I fought the urge to run home and find my Tweezerman. He wore a black shirt with little shiny translucent stripes running through it, a white short-sleeved undershirt and black trousers. And white socks. There was also a big gold pendant hanging from a chain around his neck, a shiny bracelet and diamond-studded watch. Looking at him, I felt like I was having an eighties moment.
‘Wait a minute,’ my mother instructed, and moved off to consult with Nina’s new mother-in-law. I knew she figured that if the man she saw was not from our side of the family, then he must surely be from the other.
At that precise second, the guy with one eyebrow turned to look at me. My stomach sinking, I saw him lean over and say something to Maharaj Girdhar, who quickly moved to intercept my mother. The two talked quietly for a few minutes, while I stood alone, in my shimmering pinkness, looking around awkwardly. I knew I should be off celebrating and chatting inanely with random family members, but just couldn’t summon up the initiative.
I saw my two younger brothers, surrounded by a gaggle of girlies who were brilliant and shiny in their embroidered saris, dangling earrings and colourful bangles. My brothers were the undisputed Princes William and Harry of this community, albeit somewhat older than the British royals. Anil was twenty-nine and Anand two years younger, and they were the hottest and most eligible boys around. In their Indian silk outfits, both clean-shaven, hair combed neatly back, their smiles revealing perfect teeth and an attitude often described in these parts as ‘happy-go-lucky, easy-coming-easy-going’, they looked as if they’d just stepped off the set of a Listermint commercial. Other, younger, girls on the Great Husband-Hunt were mesmerized by them – as were their pushy mothers. Of course, the fact that the boys stood, one day, to inherit a substantial jewellery and antiques business didn’t hurt their combined appeal. I figured I would go and join them and let the young girls be fawningly nice to me. Always a plus to having an eligible brother or two.
But first I saw my father stepping outside alone, so I followed him.
He was looking over the metal gates surrounding the temple, and out on to the sea. He seemed wistful, perhaps remembering all the family weddings he had attended here, in this very temple – three in the past year alone – and how at each one he had prayed that the next time he came it would be to give his own daughter away.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. When he opened them, he saw me walking towards him, negotiating my way on ridiculously high-heeled shoes that he knew I had spent way too much money on.
‘Fresh air,’ he said, enjoying a rare moment of calm in what had been a wedding-crazed week. ‘All is well. God is great,’ he sighed, pensive and calm.
I paused, then said, ‘It stinks out here. Daddy, this is so not fresh air. You’d have a better chance of finding it standing on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-Seventh. I can see your lungs blackening! Come on, let’s go back in,’ I said, hoping to interrupt his regretful thoughts about me, if that was indeed what preoccupied him.
Back in the temple hall, my mother, beaming, rejoined us.
‘Anju, beti, he’s asked for you. That boy. Maharaj Girdhar said he likes you and wants to meet you. What do you think?’
Part of me, I had to concede, was flattered. It was not every day that a man would look at me across a crowded, overheated room, and decide right off that he wanted to marry me. The last time it happened, I’d been with my girlfriends in a seedy salsa club on Eighth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. There, a man in a polyester pinstriped suit and a handlebar moustache told me he wanted to marry me, right before he threw up in a potted plant. That, pitifully, had been my last proposal.
And that was basically what this was. As loose an expression of interest as it seemed, this was a proposal, no doubt about it.
There was, however, the whole issue of first impressions. The last man I’d dated wore Prada. No gold, no gum. He’d been cool. And he had neat eyebrows. But there certainly had been no proposal forthcoming.
But, here and now, my mother didn’t want to hear about bad dress sense. That was an unacceptable reason to say no.
‘What shall I tell Maharaj?’ she asked me again.
‘Mum,’ I whispered, ‘he looks like he should be on some America’s Most Wanted list.’
‘Anju, be serious!’
‘OK, OK. Where’s he from?’
‘Accra.’
‘As in Accra, Ghana, West Africa?’ I exclaimed. ‘What the hell am I going to do in Accra?’
‘Don’t say hell here, beti. People will hear you. They’ll think you have no manners.’
Mr Monobrow was a vague distant relative of the groom, here to find a wife. He was from a well-to-do family that had made its money in grocery stores, my mother told me.
‘Beti, Maharaj says he’s a very good boy. Very good family. Plenty of money. At least meet him, no?’
‘I’m sure he’s perfectly nice, Mum, but really, I can’t imagine living in Accra. I mean, aren’t there military coups there every five minutes? And he just seems, you know, a bit kind of uninteresting. I can’t see that we’d have anything in common.’
My mother gave me that familiar look: the super-sized frustration-annoyance combo, with a side order of impatience thrown in.
‘Anju, really, sometimes I think you have been in Umrica too long.’ She sighed, and returned to the priest, who was waiting for an answer. She went to tell him they would think about it. In Indian-parent parlance, that meant she needed a day or two to convince me.
Mr Monobrow, in the meantime, had sidled off to the buffet table, with a short, plump woman who was probably his mother. I went off and found Namrata, Nina’s eighteen-year-old sister, who had been given gift-holding duty.
‘Hey, sweetie, what’s up?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, didi. Just so tired. My feet are really paining me,’ Namrata replied. She was toting a Singapore Duty Free Stores plastic bag filled with pretty envelopes, little silk purses and the odd velvet box, all containing cash, gold coins and jewellery.
‘How are you, didi? Having a good time?’ she asked.
Namrata was, like her sister, wholesome and good-natured. She reminded me of Britney Spears in her pre-sex siren days, all perky and popular, but minus the cropped tops and mini-skirts. Like her newly married sister, Namrata too could sing – from Hindi film songs to religious bhajans. She had learnt how to pickle lemons and fry papads perfectly. And with her soft, fair, plump complexion, she was every Indian male’s dream-wife. She looked a vision tonight, in a floaty lilac embroidered gagara-choli. She was being primed; her mother was already on the lookout for son-in-law number two. But Namrata was also bright and funny, not a cream-puff like so many of the other girls in this room, so I ran the Monobrow-dilemma by her.
‘You see that guy over there?’ I motioned to him. ‘He told Maharaj Girdhar, who told Mummy, that he’s interested in me. But he’s from Accra. What am I going to do in Accra?’
Namrata glanced over at him, and a knowing smile spread across her pretty face.
‘You know what it is, right, didi? In your baby-pink sari, you look like a marshmallow. All soft and sweet and fluffy and nothing inside but air. That’s what he would want in a wife, don’t you think?’
Two days later, I spent the morning with my mother at Bhuleshwar market. If there were such a thing as an urban