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

a thirty-four-year-old Brahmin from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Brahmins are the highest caste in India. I spoke to her in Delhi, where she was visiting on a break from her job as a supervisor at the World Bank in Washington. She had been living in the United States for sixteen years. One evening in 1971, when she was just starting out in Washington as a World Bank typist, she had gone to a friend’s house and met a man—a Tamil Brahmin, as it turned out—who was studying at the University of Texas. He seemed like “just another guy” to her. She heard nothing from him until two years later, when he sent a letter to the friend saying he wanted to marry Rama. She was not as thunderstruck as might be imagined. It was important to Rama that she marry a man of her own caste, and it was probably no less important to the groom. Tamil Brahmins are hard to come by in the United States, so it was not extraordinary that an eligible one would be interested in Rama. The friend quickly took on the role of marriage broker and wrote to both sets of parents in India.
    First, the horoscopes of the prospective couple were exchanged. “They matched perfectly,” Rama told me. The parents exchanged further details on family background and education. Then photos were mailed. A few months later, Rama’s parents declared themselves pleased. Rama, who was twenty-two and had not had a date with anyone in the four years she’d lived in America, told them she’d marry the man. “I didn’t know him at all,” she said. She had not seen him since the meeting two years before, but she was certain that her parents knew best.
    The wedding took place in 1973 in India. When I asked Rama if she had worried beforehand that she might not fall in love with the man, she gave me a puzzled look. “No,” she said. “I just thought, He is my husband, and I love him. He is going to be everything to me from now on.” Apparently he had been. After twelve years of “very happy” marriage, she said, “I still think he’s a better husband than anybody I could have asked for.”
    I remember coming home stunned from interviews like this, mystified by what was going on in the minds of these women. They had seemed so much like me at first. What I did not understand at the time was the powerful sense of fatalism that Indian women have. Strict Hindus believe that their present lives have been predetermined by their karma, the accumulated sum of all good and bad actions from their previous lives. These beliefs are so central to the religion that they influence even the casual Hindu today. Women routinely told me that they had decided to marry a man half an hour after the first meeting because they felt it was “meant” to be. “It’s the biggest gamble of one’s life,” said Ritu Nanda, the thirty-seven-year-old director of one of India’s most successful home appliance companies. “So why not just leave it to destiny?” A traditional woman believes that she was married to her husband in her previous life and will remain married to him in the next. The women I interviewed were too sophisticated to endorse that view, but nobody dismissed it as nonsense, either.
    This brings me to Meena, whose name I have changed for reasons that will be obvious. She, too, felt that her marriage was predetermined—but I’m getting ahead of the story. I first met her one summer, at the home of a friend. She was twenty-five, pretty and stylish, proud of being a “modern” girl who worked in her father’s laboratory supply business. She was from a middle-class family, was ambitious and assertive, and spoke rapid, idiomatic English. She and her parents had been engaged in an active search to find her a husband. “My parents aregoing about it in a very scientific way,” she said. That meant they were checking the matrimonial ads and alerting relatives and mutual friends to be on the lookout for prospects. “I have already been shown several boys,” she told