When my Mother Prevented Me from Marrying Wrong

This story is about the time when my mother prevented me from marrying wrong. 

I was finishing up my first Ph.D. and my mother was busy looking at matches for an arranged marriage (for those who are confused, arranged marriage is not synonymous with forced marriage, read till the end). I had said I won’t be indulging in any marriage related shenanigans until after my defense and my parents had accepted it. However, a really good match came her way and things fell into place rather quickly and unexpectedly. For reference, when people say arranged marriage in India, it is almost always endogamous, i.e within their closed caste group (an important reason why as an anti-caste feminist, I have issues with it). In my caste, a lot of my features/aspects were seen as undesirable. I wasn’t fair-skinned, I wore glasses, I wasn’t slender, and most importantly, I was studying liberal arts (which led families to reject me outright). No science, no finance, no prospects was the general belief. 

This was the reason I had agreed to let Mom engage in her groom search in the first place. I knew her daughter wasn’t desirable marriage material (it was a good thing, trust me).

So imagine my surprise when this guy and his family looked at my picture, my education, and decided they wanted to meet me! I was so flabbergasted that I said I won’t travel to their city because I needed to finish writing my dissertation. To my further surprise, the guy’s family said they’d come down to my city for the meeting! They had no hangups about being the groom side and yet making all the concessions. 

And this guy? Tall, fair-skinned, glasses, brilliant eyes, well-spoken. I immediately told him I was wearing contact lenses so there would be no issues later. And when my mom started setting the table for lunch, this guy got up and helped my mother set the plates! Now, my readers, you might not think this is a big deal, but believe me, in India at that time, in the context of an arranged marriage, with his parents sitting right there, it was a HUGE deal! HUGE. The parents were nice too, humble and grounded. Simple people who were not difficult to connect with. 

Two of my four aunts (Mom’s sisters) were also at my home coincidentally when all this unfolded and as expected everyone was al praises for the guy and the family. Objectively, he checked every box on the arranged marriage list. Every. Single. One. 

There was one small caveat. My heart said no. Only it wasn’t a logical reason to cite and at the end of that day, feeling the pressure of all expectations upon me, I said yes. I freaking said yes! 

Mom communicated our decision to them and the next day they returned to their home town. 

Me? I spent three days crying my eyes out, silently and in privacy at first, but then openly in the presence of my parents because I just couldn’t hold back the tears. When my mom saw me, she was aghast. She consoled me saying that if I didn’t want to marry this person, she wasn’t going to force me to. I told her that my instinct, my deepest gut feeling, my heart kept saying no. This was three days after we had given them our decision. 

Mom called them to say I’d changed my mind. The guy’s married sister was at home with them and pelted my mom with angry words and insults but mom calmly explained that if my heart was not in the marriage, she was not going to force me. The sister said that they had already told their relatives about this match and how they would lose face. My mother explained (I was right by her side when she’d made that phone call) that her daughter had spent three days crying about the impending marriage, it was more important than saving face. 

At this point, my readers, you must assume that my mother was the best mother in the world (she wasn’t perfect but she did have our backs every time) but there was a reason behind her staunch stance. One of her relatives had undergone a similar situation before her wedding and which my mom had witnessed first hand. This woman, then probably 22, had wept until her wedding day and no one had paid her any heed. Fast forward to several years later, she spent a miserable life with her husband. They had nothing in common and there was no love between them. It was this history that thwarted my marriage to the wrong person. 

This incident is what inspired Tara’s story in The Art of Taking Second Chances. When Tara accepts her predetermined fate that she was to become an engineer, she faces the same deep sorrow that I did. And like me, her mother comes to her rescue and asks her wants she envisions herself as. “I’m an artist,” Tara says and everything feels right again. 

Now, if you’ve been waiting for the climax that this guy I rejected turned out to be a bad person, I’m going to disappoint you. I have no idea what happened to him after. In all likelihood, he married his perfect person and lives a very happy life. I’m still confident that he was a good man and that his family was genuinely nice. He just wasn’t right for me because a year later I found my perfect person who isn’t put off by my weirdness, who has embraced me and my quirky self wholeheartedly and who is the reason I write the kind of stories I do, the kindhearted men who deserve my fierce heroines. He is my real-life romance hero, no exaggeration.