May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller Page A

before.
    Middle-class India defines love as long-term commitment and devotion to family, which can be developed only with much patience and time. In their view, Americans instead define love as passion—which inevitably leads to disappointment in marriage after the glow of those first romantic years wears off. This reasoning always seemed to me a striking example of the Indian belief in their moral superiority over what many of them see as the decadent West, with its dismal record of divorce. Americans just give up, Indians believe, when the marriage hits the rough spots and falls short of an unattainable ideal. Sudhir Kakar, one of India’s foremost psychoanalysts, put it this way: “Americans have too great an investment in marriage. The peculiar part is that you think any human institution should satisfy so many different needs. Americans say there should be romance, a mother for the children, intellectual stimulation also. For two people to be all that to each other is a bit much.”
    Many of the young women I met dismissed “falling in love” as something for teenagers and bad Indian films. A few said they had experienced “puppy love” with a boy at school but assured me they were too grown-up for that now. One of these women was Meeta Sawhney, the twenty-year-old Delhi University economics student who had convinced me that women would be my window into the Indian interior world. As she had explained to me: “When my friends who are in love talk to me, I think they sound silly.” She had become engaged that summer to a childhood friend her parents had chosen for her. We had been talking for an hour in her bedroom when I finally asked if she loved him. “That’s a very difficult question,” she said. “I don’t know. This whole concept of love is very alien to us. We’re more practical. I don’t see stars, I don’t hear little bells. But he’s a very nice guy, and I think I’m going to enjoy spending my life with him. Is that love?” She shrugged, indicating no worries about her future. “I know this is going to work. I know everything about him. I know his family. On the other hand, if I were in love with this guy, I would be worried because then I’d be going into it blindly.”
    I thought this was madness, or a good job of brainwashing, but later decided Meeta Sawhney was simply rationalizing what she had beendealt in her life. What choice did she have? Only women from the most Westernized families have the luxury of falling in love before marriage, and even they had best do it only once. In America, a young woman can move on after her first, intense love affair fizzles, but an Indian woman risks gossip that might ruin her chances of a good husband later. One very Westernized couple I knew had dated quietly for a year and a half. At that point, the man’s mother took him aside and told him that since the woman was from a good family, he could no longer risk her reputation by stringing her along. He had one of two choices: either cut off the relationship or make her his wife. He did the honorable thing and married her.
    Most teenagers are still not allowed to date, so parents think their children will have no experience on which to make an intelligent decision about a lifelong mate. One of a mother’s biggest fears is that her carefully penned-in daughter will make a getaway one day and fall for the first rogue who comes along. I remember the ruckus in one Indian family I knew when their beautiful niece fell for a handsome Mexican exchange student. I was rooting for her, but alas, one of the interloper’s old girlfriends turned up and whisked him off to south India, breaking the niece’s heart but averting a family crisis. Most girls are more docile and have come to believe what they have been told from childhood: that they will love the husband their parents select. “From the beginning, my mind was set that my parents were going to choose the right person for me,” explained Rama Rajakumar,