SOCIETY:An Indian journalist in her 30s returns to Delhi from New York in search of a husband - to find a changed homeland, writes Bridget Hourican.
A CONVERSATION IN Delhi between Anita Jain's father and her prospective suitor, Vinod:
"If my daughter Anita is sick and cannot cook, who cooks dinner?"
Waving his hand as if shooing away a fly, Vinod replies: "I have a maid."
"The maid is sick. Who cooks?"
"I have two maids."
"The other maid is sick too. Who cooks?"
"I'd hire a third," says Vinod unblinkingly.
"Forget the bloody maids! What do you do?" Papa bellows at Vinod.
"What, these hotels and restaurants are going to shut down all at once?"
Game and set to Vinod, but no match. Anita and Papa are back to trawling dating sites. Papa writes her online profile - "which may be why some of my dates are surprised to discover I enjoy a glass of wine or two" - and the prospectives' parents reply to him, cc-ing Anita. Peremptory requests arrive in her inbox for date, time and location of birth, to determine astrological compatibility.
Which may be par for the course in India, but Anita was brought up in California, went to Harvard, and is a successful New York journalist, used to initiating and ending affairs. Her doting parents stood fondly by until she crossed "the unmarriageable threshold for Indian women, 30", at which point they turned the pressure up: western courtship isn't working, time to go back to traditional methods.
They had little persuading to do. Anita was by then so fed up with American dating - men making straight for her breasts, eschewing kissing as "a bit intimate" - that out with a married, pregnant friend in Central Park one day, she collapsed in tears. Having an alternative not open to other New York singletons, she upped and moved to Delhi, and began actively matchmaking.
At this point, Anita should meet a doctor or engineer of similar caste, get married, and live happily ever after. There's precedent. Her parents met only once before their wedding and are "among the happiest couples" she's ever known. But although her father often states with the certainty of the expat, that "India will always be India forever. It can never change" - India has changed. The crowd Anita hangs round with drink, smoke hash, dance to western pop, and sleep with each other, no strings attached. It's not that much different to the States, except it's more relaxed - "males and females aren't locked in battle".
However, while she's having more fun, this isn't what Anita moved to Delhi for, and soon her parents arrive to get her back on track. Her father takes out an ad in the Times of India - "US-educated Jain girl, thirty-three years old, Harvard graduate, working for international newspaper seeks broadminded groom". The key word is "broad-minded" but even after stringent culling, the suitors aren't broadminded enough for Anita's exacting Papa. One says his wife would be expected to live with his parents.
"My daughter has lived in Mexico City, London, Singapore, and New York," says Papa proudly, "She may find it difficult to adjust to living with your parents. And she doesn't do housework."
PAPA IS THE hero of this book. What a relief it is, after one more hesitant, self-obsessed suitor bails out, to have this loyal, energetic, self-made man bustle in to cheer up his daughter - "don't worry, beti. We love you anyway whatever you've become" - and devise a new plan of campaign. An ardent feminist, he still addresses his wife by the formal, courteous "aap" rather than the abrupt "tu"; he cooks and does housework; he takes in his two sisters-in-law, fleeing from abusive husbands, and refers to his nephew as his son. It becomes obvious why Anita can't find anyone - how are these spoiled, confused, modern boys to measure up to Papa?
Despite the book's title and stated aim, Anita doesn't actually try that hard to get married. Instead she starts up with a Lothario 10 years her junior - "Phone conversations proceed like this: 'Hi Arishtu, listen, don't hang up. I just wanted to talk, please, don't hang . . . shit, you hung up.'" This is funny, demeaning and not the behaviour of someone focusing on marriage. (She's focusing on Mr Right, which isn't the same thing at all).
Marrying Anita is frank and witty and taps into four different genres. It's a "desperate singleton" book, all irony and farce like Bridget Jones's Diary; it's an exotic travelogue, obliquely referencing Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust. It's also a kind of fairytale, in the Blue Bird vein rather than Cinderella. Happiness comes from the journey, not the reward; you may not find your heart's desire, but you may find peace - those, I think, are the messages.
But what Marrying Anita really reminds me of is a blog. It didn't begin life as a blog, but the style seems blog-influenced - confiding, rueful, frank (sometimes too frank, did we really want to read her old love letters?) and episodic. One imagines Anita sitting down after each incident and firing off a despatch for hungry readers. Blog-style is a growing literary trend, and I'm not sure it's a positive one. The virtue of a blog, like a newspaper, is immediacy - this is happening to the blogger now; she just offered to give a virginal Sikh kissing lessons. Who wants yesterday's papers? Who wants yesterday's blog? For obvious reasons books can't replicate that immediacy, and what you're left with feels like a blog's random episodic inconclusiveness. What's missing is epiphany, resolution and atmosphere, the sense that you've entered another world, enclosed within two covers. A good book is not just an extension of the author, a fast despatch from keyboard to online; it has a life of its own, and takes even its creator by surprise.
Perhaps this book will morph into a blog. Enough of Anita's readers will want to know what happens next. We leave her in India, still single but with "a full-of-possibility, anything-can-happen feel" - here's hoping she finds, if not Mr Right, then at least Mr Alright.
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Bridget Hourican is a freelance journalist and historian
Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India, By Anita Jain, Bloomsbury, 307pp. £12.99