The Father of the Bride-to-be

In India, he could be a factory-manufactured creature, identical in all essentials

Like I mentioned in my last column, 2013 brought with it my 26th birthday. Several things happened at once as I crossed 26. But the highlight of the month was the renewed vigour with which the K family has started the groom hunt for their last 20-something single daughter. I’m almost certain that somewhere, buried within my extensive family tree, there are cousins (twice, maybe thrice removed) who have escaped into their 30s without tying the knot, but these women are the K family’s urban legends. Everyone is sure they exist, but nobody knows the precise details. That’s the beauty of the many cover-ups deployed to mask a girl’s single status in the K family. If calculations put her in the vicinity of 30, the questions come to a screeching halt. In all their wisdom and kindness, the elders of the family decide that if she (or her parents) couldn’t snare her a groom in 30 whole years, there must be something innately un-marriageable about her. So to prevent distress to her poor parents’ tortured souls, everyone soothes themselves with the America story. Every time one of us asks, “Mum, where is the Ph.D didi?” the answer is so rehearsed, it might as well have come from a call centre manual: “She moved to America.” Moved there to go to NASA? Moved there to take Goldman Sachs by storm? No one knows. America is the Bermuda Triangle of single K family girls. It swallows them whole and never even burps. Some day, I might be banished there. But for now, the groom hunt is on with a vengeance.

Which brings me to the point of this column: the father of the bride. Last weekend, I was bed-ridden and stuck at home for almost five days due to a back injury. Which means 120 uninterrupted hours with mum and dad. I know their routine, but watching it play out minute-by-minute has given me a newfound respect for the groom hunt. I’ve realised that in India, there exists an ignored species of men. Brave men with extraordinary patience. They are the fathers of the bride-to-be-to-be. Two to-bes, not one. I belong to this sisterhood. We are women who, thanks to sisters and cousins who are just waiting to share some of their hard-earned marriage advice, and bored aunts who live only to see their nieces married, have the colours of our wedding lehengas and songs for our sangeets listed and ready. The only variable missing is the groom.

Enter, stage right, the father of the bride-to-be-to-be.

Becoming a bride-to-be-to-be is a lot like entering Hotel California. You can check out, but you can’t leave. I checked in three years ago and I’m still here. And right beside me is my dad. In the time that we’ve been trundling through this quagmire, I’ve noticed several changes in him. I was 23 and ripe for the picking in the marriage orchard at the time. I’d taken the long, scenic, parent-approved route called financial journalism. The bargaining chips were ours. But then I switched careers and turned into a poorly paid features writer. One year and many sex stories later, dad’s confident smile started wavering. He moved swiftly. Within weeks, my profiles on various matrimonial websites became the top results for a Google search of my name. For a man who had taken two months to master the fine art of attaching documents on emails, he can now teach digital agencies a thing or two about SEO and SEM. It’s not about my dad alone. That’s just the level of commitment the father of the BTBTB brings to his job. Another peculiarity about the father of the BTBTB is his selective vision. An uncle, a recently retired father of the BTBTB family friend, could accurately predict how many grams his now-married daughter would put on if ever a samosa dared to disappear from the breakfast table. My own father can see zits too tiny to be discerned by the average human eye. But then again, it’s churlish to assume there’s anything average about the father of the BTBTB.

While he is blessed with laser vision on some occasions, on others, he’s denser than the fog in Delhi on a winter morning. Somehow, hickeys the size of small continents and bee-stung lips after ‘sleep-overs’ don’t seem to strike him as odd at all. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. An Indian father of the BTBTB needs to believe that his daughter brings her hymen to the marriage table. Without it, the system collapses like a pack of cards. With the hymen, there is hope for resurrection from even the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe a divorcee whose wife took a lover, just so there’s no doubt about his character, or, even better, a widower, because here the ex cannot resurface to disturb the couple’s tranquillity. But without it… I don’t know what happens because quite obviously, there’s no recorded instance of a K family girl having lost hers. We’re known to have lost our Pradas and break our Choos. But our virginities and hymens have stayed intact. Thank you, bugs and bees, without you, there’d be a hell of a lot of unanswered questions. 

 

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