Column

You know how it is with old friends whom you haven’t seen for decades. Conversation soon slows and reaches a dead end after all the polite niceties — questions about how-are-you, how-many-children-and-grandchildren-do-you-have kind — have bean dealt with.

This time, however, this accidental encounter with our former neighbours (let’s call them the Varmas) went on late into the evening.

You see, they are there: California, the land of plenty and tantalisingly expanding horizons. And we are here: New Delhi, with some of us living the American dream, and the concomitant American nightmare, right here, without leaving these shores.

Inevitably, the banter drifts towards how their lives differ, in essence, from ours. Finally, the conversation finds its groove and lingers over the subject of the changing equation between the diasporic desis and the desi desis.

Nothing defines the dynamics of this relationship better than marriage. Actually, make that the business of finding suitable brides and grooms.

Traditionally, the homeland was the catchment area for spouses. The time-tested marriage brokers, like barbers and mohalla aunties, became somewhat redundant with the advent of online matrimonial agencies.

The business of making alliances became that much easier. In this era of turnaround marriages, a young man came, saw, and if not quite conquered, found a bride and walked her round the nuptial fires before you could say, well, swayamwar.

All within the three weeks of leave our NRIs could muster from their bosses in the United States or in Europe. Those were the days of dollar dreams and the desi-American or desi-angrez was a good “catch”.

But then India began to shine, at least parts of it did. And it became ever more difficult for this millennium’s “fishing fleet” of bride-seekers coming here from distant shores to find wives. (The term was cheekily coined for the single British women who came by the shiploads to Bombay and Calcutta in search of husbands during the days of the Raj.)

The Varmas tell us that their two year long hunt for a suitable Indian bride for their son, an engineer in the States, had all been in vain. Almost all the women whom they came across or enquired about were adamant about not wanting to live abroad.

Life is more than good enough for them here. A growing number of young women are leading the kind of lives they want to. They have jobs they like, and professional ambitions that have yet to be satiated.

Thirty is fast becoming the new twenty: marriage can wait. Besides, why would they want to live in London or California or wherever and have to cook and clean when they had bais to do it for them here. Apparently, a couple of the prospective brides didn’t mind moving overseas if there were a live-in maid or two.

Life for many may have been (if I may steal from Milan Kundera) “elsewhere”. It’s now all here. We used to look forward to our uncles and aunties from America coming here, like Santa Claus, with theirbags of “foreign” goodies. We would welcome them in our homes; give them the largest bedroom, squeezing the rest of the family into the remaining rooms to do so.

The welcome mats may still be out but their goodies and the lifestyles they symbolise have lost the gloss. We have created bits of America and Europe here — why you even get imported loo paper — all available in the mall near you.

There is an interesting postscript to the Varma’s tale. Laments Mrs Varma: “We bring up our children, our girls with our morality and our values, as we were brought up. But the boys here think that the girls brought up in the US will be too fast. They still want to marry women in India.” Her daughter, like a rising number of overseas Indian women, married a gora. And is, incidentally, very happy.

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist.