“Did you fall in love with her?” For conservative Indians like my parents, “falling in love” is an American illness, a condition to avoid as one avoids warts or gonorrhea. But I need Daddy to confess that he felt something for Mummy when he married her, and this is the only way I know to ask. But he doesn’t answer. He gives me a vocabulary lesson instead. “Indians don’t ‘fall,’ Debie. We don’t marry by accident. We choose. Choose to marry, choose to love. We’re not powerless like Americans.” By age twelve, I’m attentive enough to words and their precise meanings to be shaken by Daddy’s explanation. It hasn’t struck me until that moment that “falling in love” is a passive activity. That it can’t, by definition, involve choice or volition. Nothing in my careful dichotomizing of American freedom and Indian oppression explains this upending, and my twelve-year-old self protests. What does Indian culture know about choice? What could epitomize choicelessness more than an arranged marriage? Falling? The possibility stumps me. It stumps me still.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 19:35:16 +0000