Here & now with you

Prologue

Your father was no different. My mother used to tell me all these stories of men. Men who loved, men who conquered and won. Then she told me about my dad. How he ruined everything that she was. Everything that she could have been. I listened patiently to her words. She told me that she wasn’t always like this, full of poison and truce. He made her like this, she told me. I wanted to believe her and I did. But I also believed my dad when he used to say that a woman is the biggest mistake of a man’s life. That was my first encounter to marriage and co-existence. I decided then only, that I will never get married. And as I was a straight woman, things seemed much more complicated for me.
Men ruining women was not something rare to me. I’ve grown hearing it since my childhood. My grandmother used to live with me when I was younger. She used to say to me, don’t let a man ever decide what is right for you. I lived my life believing that, I decided that I had to be independent. I grew well, as well as someone living in Hastinapur would. I got a job through SSC and had a whopping forty thousand salary credited in my bank account every first of the month. But still I never seemed happy to my family. They thought something was still missing. They got the end of their boredom when a guy from Mall road, came upon asking my hand in marriage. And as I was single and average-looking they set it up. The guy had a shop in Mall Road itself, of garments I assume. I never challenged my parents so when my mother came smiling to me in a long time with a piece of red clothing. I smiled back. I pretended because I didn’t know any better. I acted like a conventional girl is supposed to act. I adorned the red sari upon my body and became ready for display.
Nothing gives Indian parents more pleasure than seeing their daughter trying to please everyone. They think they have raised her right if she’s ready to compromise herself for everyone else. Above all, sacrifice is the first word in an Indian woman’s dictionary regardless of its alphabetical position. I’ve stayed aloof from rebellion all my life. And I’m not even the rebel kind. And our parents know the best for us. Whether it was giving us up like a piece of property. I was still compared with honor and prestige. I was taken as a goddess since my childhood. I told myself that again. When I draped the saree around me. I never liked makeup, neither did my parents. They always said that I looked better without it, so today when my mom came up to me with an eye-shadow palette, I was taken aback. Why now? I thought. I got the answer immediately, it was all for the display. They wanted the conventional good girl for the world, and the convenient hoe for the men. Not that there’s anything bad with hoes. The bad lies with the world and the ones who choose to make you everything according to their wishes.
This is the first time I rebelled, “I don’t want to put it on.” I said and she stepped back, like she’d been doing all her life. I adjust the hem on my shoulder. I put on a bindi along with a shade of red lipstick, my face bare other than that. It’s not like I don’t want to get married. Everyone has to get married someday with someone. I just had a more unrealistic version of it. I wanted love and quarrel, fights and breakups even sex for some reason. I never wanted to be plain even if the world knows that I am. And it’s not like there hasn’t been anyone. There was a guy. He still is there and god I want him so much, but he would never get married, not to me. And as I am a coward otherwise, I let him go.
There were times when I was taught all this, to be desirable. Funny it is, how for one moment they tell you to be boring and ugly so no man could ever look at you with lust, and the next moment they expect you to be the seductress, because a woman is supposed to play all parts nicely. When I put down tea on the table for everyone, the guy looks up at me, he is decent looking except for the paunch. I try not to be so materialistic and reprimand myself. He stares at my cleavage and smirks. So much for modesty, I think. I think about all the women who has done this before me, to him. How many he had the power to reject, for their skin color, their body types, their height and their bone structure or even their smile. I think about how he would reject me. I hope he does. As I can’t have an opinion I was told from the beginning. My parents raised me to be educated and independent, but they never wanted trouble. They told me repeatedly, that I had to get married according to their choice. I was my father’s favorite so I listened, that is the price of love. All my cousins, who were not loved left their homes and eloped then divorced their husbands or maybe it was the other way round. But the story was the same always, men were trouble and they ruined your life.