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For Matrimonial Purposes
KAVITA DASWANI
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
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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
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Source ISBN: 9780007160587
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007387908 Version: 2016-10-03
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
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