Arranged Marriage: Stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

and have children, but neither of us was in a hurry. The households of friends who had babies seemed to me a constant flurry of crying and feeding and burping and throwing up, quilts taped over fireplace bricks for padding and knickknacks crammed onto the top shelf out of the reach of destructive little hands. And over everything hung the oppressive stench(there was no other word for it) of baby wipes and Lysol spray and soiled diapers.
    I guessed, of course, that there was more to child-rearing than that. Mother-love, for instance. I’d felt the flaming rush of it when I’d gone to the maternity ward to visit Sharmila, who’d been my best friend at work before she quit (abandoned me, I claimed) to have a baby.
    Sharmila had pressed her cheek to the baby’s wrinkled one, to that skin translucent and delicate like expensive onionskin paper, and looked at me with eyes that shone in spite of the hollows gouged under them. “I’d never have thought I could love anyone so much, so instantly, Meera,” she’d whispered. And this from a woman who’d always agreed that the world already had too many people in it for us to add to the problem! So I knew mother-love was real. Real and primitive and dangerous, lurking somewhere in the female genes—especially our Indian ones—waiting to attack. I was determined to watch out for it.
    Many of my women friends considered me strange. The Americans were more circumspect, but the Indian women came right out and asked. Don’t you mind not being married? Don’t you miss having a little one to scramble onto your lap when you come home at the end of the day? I’d look at their limp hair pulled into an unattractive bun, their crumpled saris sporting stains of a suspicious nature, the bulge of love handles that hung below the edges of their blouses. (Even the ones who made an effort to hang on to their looks seemed intellectually diminished, their conversations limited to discussions of colic and teething pains and Dr. Spock’s views on bed-wetting.) They looked just like my cousins back homewho were already on their second and third and sometimes fourth babies. They might as well have not come to America.
    “No,” I would tell them, smoothing my silk Yves St. Laurent jersey over my own gratifyingly slim hips. “Most emphatically no.”
    But I could see they didn’t believe me.
    Nor did my mother, who had for years been trying to arrange my marriage with a nice Indian boy. Every month she sent me photos of eligible young men, nephews and second cousins of friends and neighbors, earnest, mustachioed men in stiff-collared shirts with slicked-back Brylcreem hair. She accompanied these photographs with warnings (I wasn’t getting any younger; soon I’d be thirty and then who would want me?) and laments (look at Roma-auntie, her daughter was expecting her third, while thanks to me, she remained deprived of grandchildren). When I wrote back that I wasn’t ready to settle down (I didn’t say anything about Richard, which would have upset her even more), she decried my crazy western notions. “I should never have given in and allowed you to go to America,” she wrote, underlining the never in emphatic red.
    In spite of the brief twinge of guilt I felt when yet another fat packet with a Calcutta postmark arrived from my mother, I knew I was right. Because in Indian marriages becoming a wife was only the prelude to that all-important, all-consuming event—becoming a mother. That wasn’t why I’d fought so hard—with my mother to leave India; with my professors to make it through graduate school; with my bosses to establish my career. Not that I was against marriage—or evenagainst having a child. I just wanted to make sure that when it happened, it would be on my own terms, because I wanted it.
    Meanwhile I heaved a sigh of relief whenever I came away from the baby-houses (that’s how I thought of them, homes ruled by tiny red-faced tyrants with enormous lung power). Back in my