The Mango Season - By Amulya Malladi Page 0,13

It also made a difference to the suitors Thatha managed to find for her. After all, a girl in her late twenties had a chance at making a better match than one who was thirty.

Objectively speaking, Sowmya would be considered plump; she wore thick glasses and had dark skin—even darker than mine. Her hair was curly and thin and she was not a beauty by anyone’s standards. But what no one saw was that Sowmya’s heart was as big as the pot she used to make payasam in during festivals.

Arranged marriage is not just a crapshoot, as many believe it to be. It is a planned and business-like approach to marriage. A man’s parents want certain qualities in their daughter-in-law, and a woman’s parents want certain qualities in their son-in-law. What the children want usually does not figure in the equation. The parents try to find the perfect match and hope for the best.

Women like Sowmya get caught in no-man’s-land. They have no qualities that anyone is looking for, which means that they have to settle for someone who is in the exact same position, someone who has been rejected by numerous suitors for being less qualified. It’s like finding a job. The job you get is equivalent to your qualifications and what you want does not really matter.

Despite having a bachelor’s in Telugu literature, Sowmya had never held a job in her life. Working, my illustrious and narrow-minded Thatha said, was not for women of our class. And what job could she get anyway? With her education, at best, she could be a secretary or a clerk. Unacceptable to Thatha. Those were careers and jobs for people with a lower socioeconomic status than his.

In the food chain of the Indian academic world, doctors and engineers took the top spots. Ma had been pleased when I got through the entrance exam to get into an engineering school. After all, that ensured a good marriage match for me. It also meant that I could get a job that would not embarrass my parents and would be appropriate for a woman of my social station.

However, Sowmya could not get a job equivalent to her social status because she was not academically qualified, just as she couldn’t get the life partner she fantasized about because she was not physically qualified.

The sad part of it was that Sowmya accepted it as her fate and did nothing to change any part of it and write her own destiny. She probably didn’t fantasize anymore, didn’t even dream about a husband and family anymore. She had sat through many ceremonies during which the prospective groom and his family visited my grandparents’ house to see the prospective bride. Earlier, Sowmya had kept count, but now, almost ten years since the whole drama had begun, she had stopped. My mother, however, hadn’t.

“Sixty-four matches and not one worked out,” she told me during my current visit.

In the beginning, Thatha had refused to budge from his goal of getting a good-looking doctor or engineer for Sowmya. Even when it became evident that the matches he was finding were not going to pan out, he continued. It was when Sowmya turned twenty-five that Thatha started to realize he may have been aiming too high. He started looking at bank managers and the like, but again nothing worked out because he wanted a young man for Sowmya, but men who were twenty-seven years old were looking at girls who were twenty-one, not twenty-five. Now Thatha was looking at lecturers and older men. While Thatha looked for a suitable boy, Sowmya sat through bride-seeing ceremonies and rejections.

“God knows when she will get married,” Ma complained bitterly. “An unmarried daughter, Priya, is like a noose around the neck that is slowly tightening with every passing day.”

I sometimes imagined how it would be to live with my parents and be constantly reminded of how lacking I was. I would slit my wrists in no time and I was amazed that Sowmya hadn’t. She was still the same person I had grown up with; the bitterness that no one would blame her for having seemed to have never touched her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t say things like that,” I said to Lata, wanting to defend my nonconfrontational aunt against the harsh dowry remark. “It isn’t fair to turn this on Sowmya because she likes Anand’s wife.”

Lata quirked an eyebrow. “You are back, what, half an hour, and already you are taking sides?”

My mother held up her hand to silence