Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India; Anita Jain, Bloomsbury, £12.99.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy women are all alike; every unhappy woman is unhappy in her own way. And that way is triggered usually by the absence of a man, if a couple of recent titles by woman authors are anything to go by.
If every yin needs its yang, every Radha her Krishna, well, then, why should an Anita or an Arshi be denied hers?
Drastic changes
The woman’s search for the perfect man is probably the oldest story there is. With every generation, the field placings have been redrawn and the goalposts shifted but it may not be an exaggeration to say that the most drastic changes in the ‘must-have’ list have occurred over the past couple of decades or so.
If our mothers wanted good providers and respectable families and sympathetic soul-mates, we seek all three — in men who are our intellectual equals, confident enough in their own careers to encourage ours and in a place in life that makes them want what we want. The reason why women are far more demanding now than at any other point in history is best left to the experts but, at the domestic level, the inequities — or, more correctly, the equalities — between men and women make them parallel lines that seem destined to meet only at some unseen point in infinity.
It’s a situation that has bred its own sub-culture, especially in the West – think of films like “When Harry Met Sally” (1989) or the TV series “Sex and the City” (1998-2004) or the Bridget Jones books and the me-toos they spawned — so it was only a matter of time before it was transplanted here. Among the notables, we’ve had Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s You Are Here, a 20-something Arshi’s account of love and life in New Delhi and, in quick succession, Anita Jain’s Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India, an autobiographical account of, well, a 30-something’s pursuit of love and life in New Delhi.
If there’s a crucial difference between the two titles, it’s this: Madhavan addresses the local reader while Jain is far more ambitious. Her target audience is the Westerner intrigued by The India Story (somewhat under shadow at the moment, alas), impressed, perhaps, by images of mega-weddings and glass-and-steel IT hubs, but willing to invest only limited time and energy in the subject. Marrying Anita reads like India 101, an accessible, chirpily written introduction to the National Capital Region in the guise of a manhunt.
So we have plenty of one-line insights, drunken epiphanies and summations of contemporary India issues.
Consider this analysis of sexual harassment: “So-called ‘eve-teasing’ is a common phenomenon in India, perhaps due to the disconnect created by the relative visibility of women in the public sphere — as opposed to in certain parts of the Islamic world — even as gender relations are still largely circumscribed. Men see, but they are not allowed to touch, leading to pent-up frustration.”
Or this one, on financial inequities: “I’m able to install Wi-Fi, allowing me to check e-mail from bed, but my cook, Amma… who prepares fresh sabzi, dal, chapatis and rice everyday, extracts the utterly baffling third-world rate of $18.20 a month. The same amount also buys me exactly two double vodka-sodas in a place like Soho or Capitol. Good thing Amma isn’t much of a drinker.”
Global world-view
The perspective comes from Jain’s global world-view: U.S.-raised and Harvard-educated, she worked as a journalist in places as disparate Singapore and Mexico City. Returning to New York in her early-30s, she discovers all her close friends to be married and the available men to be commitment-phobic. India, where her parents were tied in arranged wedlock, she decides, is where she should look for her partner. So, after some deep rumination on the Western dating system, she takes off for New Delhi.
But Delhi has changed in the 10 years since she was last here, and what Jain finds is a generation in transition: Men more clued into Hendrix than Hariprasad Chaurasia, men who work American hours underwriting mortgages for U.S. companies, men who are openly gay — men, in fact, she would meet in New York. Her repeated run-ins with unsuitable boys make you think there’s something in that truism about certain women being magnets for certain kinds of men.
In the book, however, this makes for a parade of completely indistinguishable male characters. No matter where Jain encounters them — in a café after a matrimonial website exchange, in a restaurant at a friend’s urging, at a party — they all seem to speak in the same voice and possess the same character flaws.
She rejects men for reasons ranging from the Atkins diet (one suitor needs to lose 50lbs) to a reluctance to enter the kitchen.
With the main narrative a flop despite its possibilities — the book ends with Jain still single — all one is left with is Instant India Insights. But, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know all that already.
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