Single in the homeland

June 11, 2008



In local Indian parlance, they call it the air around you. When you’ve been away from home for a long time, you not only look different, but they believe the air around you changes. So even if you’re trying to fit in, people can simply tell from your presence that you no longer belong.

And there I was, a case of neither here nor there. And to make matters worse, single.

More than a decade had passed since I had left India. In that time, I had lived in North America and the Gulf. In short, I had grown from a girl to a woman.

A lot had changed around me but it took a visit to the local bakery in Kerala to realise that.

They were exactly how I remembered them. Sugar encrusted jellied candy in the shape of orange slices, locally called orange candy. For a second too long, I stared. I also caught the assistant baker’s attention.

“Where you from?” he asked in English. Scrutiny was delivered more in tone than language.

He didn’t want to hear that I was born in India and looked like his sister. He knew I came from far away.

Actually, he was flirting. I wouldn’t have guessed but the local guide accompanying me grew curt and took over the orders.

“How dare he think he can get a foreign wife?” muttered Nasser, my friend, guide, and adopted big brother, after we left the bakery.

Apparently, men in India don’t flirt. Maybe at a posh bar in a large metropolis but certainly not at the corner store in a small town. For a country determined to modernize as much of its infrastructure as its mindset, when it comes to marriage, little has changed over centuries. You don’t date casually and if you’re going to ask a good woman where she is from, chances are, you’re testing your marriage prospects.

My single status shone through again when visiting a remote village in Rajasthan where I found myself surrounded by veiled woman who seemed amused enough to want to run their fingers through my hair and insist I wear my sunglasses indoors.

Although they had been told that I had travelled from the UAE, they knew I was single because no woman in their right mind travels so far, without a male escort unless she is “modern.”

“She must be from TV,” one of the aunts said to the other.

Turns out, even a film heroine marries the hero at the end of a Bollywood movie but only on television had they ever seen women sitting around asking questions, like I was.

And now an entire village was almost convinced that those serious women on television were like me -- unmarried.

As I left India, I carried wise words from my friend Nasser’s nanny, who had grown old with the family and now managed his kids.

“Don’t say ‘no’ when they ask if you’re married, say it as if there might be hope,” said the nanny. “Say ‘not yet.’”