In the months immediately following her wedding, back when they still lived in Kolkata, Shashi used to wake up from her afternoon sleep and ponder how she and Robi had come to be put together in this room with its tall almirahs on the first floor of this big house in North Kolkata. She had grown up in rented rooms around the city, a set of three rooms for their family of six. One room for her parents, one that she shared with her Didu and one for her two younger brothers. There were always relatives visiting from her father’s village and they were welcome to stay for as long as their college degrees or doctor’s appointments needed them to. Shashi was used to giving room, sleeping on a mattress that she rolled up in the morning, having fish only once a day, listening to the transistor radio leaning out of the window late in the night, studying while her brothers played. This luxury of a room to herself pleased her. But sometimes she felt terribly alone. No grandmother’s chest to press her face into when her stomach twisted into hot knots. No Manai or Shona to sing with when the city was plunged into darkness by frequent load-sheddings.
She had stared at the ceiling of this new bedroom so much that she knew the contours of the shifting damp patches. She worried what would happen if the fan fell on Robi and her one night, crushing the newlyweds. Would they bother to put her back in the saree unspooled on the floor when they wheeled her body out?
Her marriage had been arranged with a boy from the Baidya caste, same as hers. But what else did they have in common? He didn’t like Simon & Garfunkel. She liked Uttam movies. He always wanted to watch the ones with Soumitro when they played on TV. What you got assigned in the draw of matches was fate. Handsome grooms wouldn’t always have a beautiful bride. See what had happened to her own brother Shona? Being a tall girl was the worst. There were so few tall Bengali men that you would probably marry an old man or a balding man. Or worse, a businessman. At least, they no longer married women off to infants to break the curse of dying unwed.
Not only was Shashi not tall, at twenty-two, she was just the right age for a bride. Robi was almost thirty. The right age for a Bengali groom. When her father’s eldest sister, Bodo Pishi, had come home with the proposal, the family had at first suspected there was something wrong with the boy. ‘Maybe an affair with an Anglo-Indian girl?’ That old romantic blockbuster was still giving bad ideas to young Bengali men. The only son of the Mallicks, one of the oldest families of North Kolkata, why would they want a match with an art teacher’s daughter? They both belonged to the small and proud community of Baidyas, but she had no property to her name and no chance of inheriting any. Her parents weren’t members of any of the old clubs.
Bodo Pishi had seen their birth charts and approved. He was a lion and she was a fish. Their lives would be without conflict. She assessed Shashi as she brought over tea and Thin Arrowroot biscuits for her. A literature or philosophy degree was the mark of a girl from a good family. Study sociology and there is the danger of becoming the kind of activist who wears sarees without starch and her hair in an angry knot. Science streams almost always mean you’re in the company of men who have their eyes set to go abroad. Those girls spend long hours in the library and get dropped home late in the evening by male classmates.
What really worked in Shashi’s favour, Bodo Pishi believed, was her complexion. It was she who had named her niece Shashi, like the moon. Light skin was heavy currency in the marriage market. And then her beloved Shashi also had long hair that framed her moon face like dark brackets. When they heard of the proposal, other aunts said good luck had fallen on Shashi because she had been fasting every Monday, eating only after she poured milk at the temple in the evening. She was bound to get a husband like Shib thakur.
The Illuminated by Anindita Ghose HarperCollins India
