‘Arranged marriage’ is likely one of the most examined social aspects of India. What of the men and women who make their own marital choices and go against the weight of societal expectation? Three such real-life couples are the focus of The Newlyweds.
Mansi Choksi, a journalist, spent six years in Mumbai and Delhi, as well as smaller cities and towns like ‘Kakheri, Karnal, Rohtak, Chandigarh, Nagpur, Basmath, Shirdi, Nanded, Beed, Akola, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Adilabad’, collecting the stories that eventually formed this book. She was inspired partly by her own family: her mother married against family wishes, and got divorced after 11 years.
I came to realize that the pursuit of love and its aftermath was ultimately a kind of displacement.
The reporting is effectively woven into the book, leaving the reader with confidence about the accuracy of the details (no mean feat with life stories where every person has an agenda) while not distracting from the focus on the couples themselves.
The book starts with a cast of characters, with rather charming and pointed descriptions:
Reshma Mokenwar, a twenty-eight-year-old sales assistant from a Mumbai suburb. She has a heart-shaped face stained yellow from a lifetime of turmeric fairness treatments and a tongue sharpened through the knife grinder of a bad marriage.
Mohammed Arif Dosani, called Arif, the son of a Muslim shopkeeper in the village of Basmath who dreams of becoming a policeman. He is twenty-three, with pockmarked cheeks, a circular nod, and a heart he keeps ice cold while flirting with city girls.
Each story has a large cast, underlining the ripple effect caused by each couple’s choices in the larger community. Two sets of parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles.. are all involved, and generally with strong negative opinions about the relationship of the couple.
One of the three couples is lesbian, an intrepid and welcome choice by the author. (It seems to me South Asian LGBT issues are often siloed into books specifically about them, as opposed to simply being included as part of the societal fabric). Reshma (described above) is sent at 13 by her poverty-stricken mother to live with her grandmother, and is married off at 17. She is revolted by her husband’s brutal nightly sexual assaults, tries to commit suicide, and when she recovers, walks out on her husband. Then she meets Preethi, a distant relative, and they fall in love, and run away together.
Neetu and Dawinder, another of the couples, are from the same village in Haryana. They are not related, but:
According to rural custom, men and women of the same village are considered to be siblings, which put Neetu and Dawinder’s relationship under the umbrella of incest.
There are multiple strikes against the couple: their families don’t talk to each other due to a previous tiff, and it is a very conservative village where the sexes are fairly strictly separated. Yet the couple sent each other signals from their windows and secretly walked home together for a full two years before their relationship was discovered. They run away to Delhi, where they plan to get help from the Love Commandos (!!), a group set up to help couples in love.
Monika and Arif are the third couple, whose Hindu-Muslim relationship is frowned on by all. Choksi briefly describes the religious riots of 1992 and the birth of the RSS, and makes it is clear that the religious divide has been internalized by most. When Arif passes through Monika’s Hindu neighbourhood
his body stiffened with fear that someone would begin thrashing him.
When Arif asks Monika to be his girlfriend, she says
But you are Muslim.
Despite all obstacles, they meet in temporarily empty flats, and a pregnancy ensues. Indian law permits abortions, but the logistics are complicated, and eventually marriage seems easier. At twenty, Monika converts to Islam to marry the 25-year-old Arif.
The book follows the 3 couples over the next few years, and it becomes obvious how poverty and housing severely limit their options. All 3 are also in danger, under siege from their families, who hunt them down across cities and states. A couple who eloped like Neetu and Dawinder, from a nearby village, had been killed by their families just two years earlier. Monika’s family brings in menacing Hindu thugs to intimidate Arif’s Muslim family. Reshma and Preethi have just found a room to rent, and jobs as waitstaff, when:
“So, sister?” Two men from her village stood at the door. “Do we look familiar?”
There isn’t a lot of dialogue in this nonfiction book, but what there is seems spot on in its distinctively Indian (generally translated) style.
Take one advice from me
This girl Monika has full-on attitude
Who are you to snatch the phone?
A particularly fascinating sidelight is shone on the Love Commandos and its ‘chairman’, Sachdev. He has lofty ideals: to save the lives of couples threatened with honor killing, but in practice is considerably more sleazy. Runaway couples are expected to donate whatever money they have, as well as be trotted out in front of donors. The finances are murky, to say the least. The couples in the shelter have to wait patiently for their paperwork, with more and more demands for money and plenty of emotional blackmail.
When Neetu reminded him that marriage registration cost only a few hundred rupees and they had paid close to fifty thousand already, Sachdev looked hurt and said he had treated them like his own children but she was bringing money between them.
The stories are sad but revealing, and it sometimes seems astonishing that any couple should survive the social, financial and emotional pressures loaded against them. Over the course of this book, the author watches one young couple ‘grow up’, one ‘grow apart’, and one ‘grow in love’. All 3 stories are interesting and well presented, so do read the book to find out what happens to each of them.
[Photos of the couples by Mansi Choksi]
This sounds really good! Thank you for reviewing it, most tantalising.