June 22nd marked the fifty-first anniversary of the day that my parents got married. One of the wonderful side benefits of having a column is that it makes gift giving so easy. I don't have to shop for people now; I can just write about them. This saves me the hassle of wandering around stores aimlessly. It also saves me money and increases the newspaper's circulation by one for the week. Hey, in this economy, that's saying something!
In the cash-strapped Indian economy of 1959, seventy-five cents would have meant something too. It's weird to think that in January of that year, Fidel Castro swept into power in Cuba, and a few months later, Mattel's Barbie Doll took the toy market by storm in the United States.
Back then, my parents were young and shy and rail-thin and awkward. My parents had the traditional, arranged Indian wedding. My mother would be turning twenty just eight days after the wedding. It seems odd to think that so soon after marriage, the stranger who is your husband will celebrate your birthday with you. But the bonds that are to be formed are with the extended family as well, not just between the individuals who are united. My mom was just nine years old when her mother died of tuberculosis at the age of 36. My grandfather never remarried, even though widowers usually did. Widows of that day, however, maintained a life of celibacy, and simplicity, almost as a form of penitence.
Perhaps one of the reasons arranged marriages have a reasonable record of survival when released into the wild is that people come into them with much fear and little expectation. It's hard to be disappointed when you expect the worst.
Like Tevye and Golde in “Fiddler on the Roof,” my parents met for the first time on their wedding day. Neither my mother nor my father had even seen photographs of each other prior to the marriage. My dad, who is seven years older than my mom, had a mustache, and my mom loathed facial hair. She says it's a good thing she hadn't seen a photo, after all.
My father is a perseverant individual who always takes things to the nth degree. He is, after all, a mathematician. For example, in school his ability to tackle math was ridiculed, so he slogged away at the subject, literally burning the midnight oil using the kerosene lamp. When he got sleepy, he would apply a little mustard oil near his eyes. (In a single generation, you can see the decline of mankind: I keep awake by eating; he kept awake by stinging his eyes.)
My father had not wanted to marry at all, but was finally persuaded because a priest had said the right girl would have a big mark of some sort. My mother had a huge scar on her arm where she had been dragged by a British Army Jeep in an accident as a child. Also, her name and his mom's names were the same: Tara. Again, you can see the decline of the human race in a single generation. When my husband and I wanted to get married, my husband told my parents that he, too, thought arranged marriages were the best, especially if he could do the arranging himself.
I'm not going to say anything here about how and when things happen in an arranged marriage. Coming from an Indian background, you have to remember that talking about sex (at least in the older, and purer generation) is taboo, even though India is home to the Kamasutra and the Khajuroa Temples.
It was months before my mom and dad actually saw much of each other face to face, but my brother was born on my mom's twenty-first birthday. My sister arrived a couple of years later, my next sister when mom was 25, and I was born two years after that.
My mom tells me that the night I was born, she had eaten too many chappatis (four) and overeaten the eggplant and potato subji at dinner. She thought initially her discomfort was from overeating, but a few hours later, I was born. My mom and dad lived in a rural area after marriage, and all of us children were home births. When I asked my mom if she wasn't nervous close to the due date of her first childbirth, she said, “Due date? Kya (what) due date?” She hadn't a clue about anything.
Ten years into their marriage, in 1969, my father flew to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics. My mother stayed behind with the four of us kids, and taught and worked on her graduate degree. Their only form of communication for three years were those thin blue aerogrammes that took ten days to cross the ocean.
Again, I reflect on the time when my husband took his current position here while I stayed behind in Ohio for six months so that our youngest could be born, the kids could finish school, our house could get sold, and we could thaw out from winter. I don't know if it was the stress or the hormones, but I wept for days as I packed things for his little “bachelor” apartment. Of course, we emailed and talked daily by cell phone. We liberally used the web cams that he had set up, and still I felt an odd silence in our house. Only then did I think about what my mother and father must have endured.
In March of 1972, my father brought us over by purchasing our airline tickets on installments on his meager graduate student stipend. He paid for those tickets monthly for years and years. My brother and sister, then 11 and 9 years old, took on paper routes in the Kentucky winter that was harsh for our Indian blood. My mother babysat for children and somehow, my parents made ends meet. I really don't know how they did it.
My mother thought she was coming to a land where people rolled in wealth. Then, jetlagged and weary from the 24-hour plane ride, where my brother lifted his feet and threw up in the airsick bag, she walked up the four flights to our new home: my father's one bedroom apartment. She rolled out chappatis with a drinking glass that my father used in lieu of a rolling pin, and found nothing much to prepare but onions.
How they have scrimped and saved and struggled over these fifty years, and stuck it out together through storms of cancer and children who would not remain true to the old ways, and reams of immigration paperwork, I do not know. But I do know that I have benefited immensely from their sacrifices. While I appreciate all they have done, I know that I will never truly understand what all their sacrifices have cost them.
Mom and Dad, Happy 51+ Years. Love, Vineeta.
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