This time with a record number of big-fat marriages, 3.8 million, being reportedly planned in the country, I’m alone in my apartment feeling lonely and out of place. (Pexels)
New DelhiJan 1, 2025 13:31 IST First published on: Jan 1, 2025 at 13:31 IST
At the ladies’ sangeet at my cousin’s wedding, the groom’s family was seated on patras with obscenely large gold-plated dishes in front of them as ‘Damadji angana hai padhare’ played in the background. A limping bride’s mother, an ophthalmologist by profession, served them food, while the mama (uncle), a physician, fanned and swatted flies for them. None of the guests were allowed to eat until the groom’s side burped. It didn’t help that the bride and groom were also doctors.
I ranted against the regressive state of affairs to my father — the only person whom I thought would understand — but he lashed out at me. Brought to tears, I decided to leave the ceremony — and not show up to the wedding the next day.
That was the first time I chose to stay away from a wedding ceremony. When I was a child, weddings were an occasion to snack, wear snazzy clothes, and check in on relatives. But suddenly, the charm of weddings faded when I realised how one’s potential is bartered away for conformity and comfort. Being of marriageable age with an MBBS has started talks of suitable matches for me. “The next big event in our family will be your marriage,” one of my aunts told me. “Settle down at the right age. Your parents need to play with their grandchildren.”
Not that these “pieces of wisdom” haven’t been flung at me earlier. I would just paste a smile on my face and nod a lot — like a battery-operated toy. This time, even as I fobbed off my aunt in the same way, I felt a sinking feeling in my chest. A sudden realisation that the normal, accepted path of marriage and kids might never be on the cards for me filled me with a strange uneasiness.
This time with a record number of big-fat marriages, 3.8 million, being reportedly planned in the country, I’m alone in my apartment feeling lonely and out of place. I can hear snatches of the shrill sounds of bugles, the pandemonium of the baaraat and cackles of laughter from aunts. I feel restless: I can never have that pie of happiness called marriage.
The desire to live life in one’s own way comes at loggerheads with the prescribed way in these moments. This doesn’t have much to do with the legal state of affairs in the country regarding queer marriages than my firm belief in non-conformism.
One can’t think of having a “bouquet of [social, political, economic] rights” without getting assimilated into a dominant, heteropatriarchal system that tends to uphold the status quo and marginalise all those who don’t follow its whims and fancies.
We seldom talk about the loneliness that comes as a necessary accompaniment to walking against the flow. The constant unmooring that one experiences during ‘Ekla chalo re’ can tire anyone easily. But finding a community of like-minded people can turn out to be an equally exhausting process. In a capitalist world, communities are formed based on what one owns rather than what one thinks. Not to mention elitist queer communities where sexual proclivities seem to be the only binding glue. It is perhaps this promise of an easy belonging that fixates me on marriage. But would that ever be enough for me?
These stressful moments of self-doubt shed light on the years of conditioning that I’ve absorbed as a sponge. It tells me about the seductive charm of conformity. How my brain is like the current flowing in A wire, always bypassing chaos to take the easiest and surest path towards comfort.
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I also realise how my middle-class upbringing has made me think of marriage as an “achievement” and society has made this social contract seem like the epitome of love. Thinking like this has dwarfed the other ways in which friends and acquaintances have loved me: Taking out my night duties at the hospital, talking me through difficult decisions, and supporting my erratic choices.
Despite having a strong ideological and intellectual backbone, these moments of emotional upheaval destabilise me. But perhaps this is how it is for people who wish for the ways of the world to change: To stand in self-made witness boxes and badger themselves with a volley of questions and counter-questions. To revel in this state of constant restiveness and not have any assurance of clean, slick answers. This is the cost of even thinking of becoming a vanguard. And there is no escaping it.
Gupta is a doctor, and author of Yeh Dil Hai Ki Chordarwaja
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