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

first seemed to me interestingand in its own way romantic. It was part of the “secret” I was looking for, I suppose—that compromise and perseverance can be as important to a successful marriage as love. Certainly no marriage in the West remains the same as it was on the wedding day. In the end, I came to see that Indians do have important insights into marriage and love. And yet, I saw too many husbands and wives in India who seemed unconnected to each other, as if the invisible thread that you can sense between a happy couple had never existed for them. They had nothing in common but the social class into which they were born. Most of the marriages I knew were not disasters, but many of the couples didn’t seem to be friends. There seemed to be an intimacy missing in Indian middle-class married life, partly because few people expect it.
    And then there was Meena. “You know,” she assured me, after tearfully finishing the story of her wedding and impending divorce, “arranged marriages do work.”

CHAPTER 3

F LAMES
A Bride Burning and a Sati
    WHEN HINDUS LOOK AT FIRE, THEY SEE MANY THINGS BEYOND FLAMES . The little blazes that accompany all religious rituals and rites of passage are also an earthly embodiment of God, both comforting and all-powerful. Ten days after a baby is born, God is in the fire at the ceremony in which the child is given a name. At marriage, a bride and groom must take seven steps around a fire, and at death, during the Hindu cremation rites, the body is consumed by the sacred purifying force with a life of its own. One year during the spring harvest festival of Holi, when I was staying with Bhabhiji and her husband in the village of Khajuron, I went to the traditional bonfire on the eve of the holiday. Logs and bundles of straw had been piled near the village temple, not far from the bathing pool where I liked to walk in the evenings. It was early March, so the night was still cold, and a full pale-yellow moon had appeared from behind a cloud. A little group of women sang strange high-pitched love songs of Radha and Krishna as the villagers arrived with bundles of wheat to singe, for good luck.One man brought a bull with a bad leg. Just before the fire was lit, he led the animal seven times around the pile, in hope of a cure, then turned his back with the rest of the crowd while Pandit-ji, the village holy man, started the blaze. Watching the leaping flames would have been inauspicious, so I turned my back, too. When it was safe to look, I turned to see the flames roaring up into a starry sky, hot, seductive and frightening. I remember watching the villagers with their bundles of wheat silhouetted against the blaze and feeling as if I had wandered into a harvest festival from a thousand years before.
    Fire is also a special presence in the lives of Hindu women. From earliest childhood, little girls are told the story of Sita, the paradigm of the loyal, long-suffering wife, who threw herself onto a burning pyre to demonstrate her purity. In the classic text of the
Ramayana
, the great Hindu epic, Sita was the submissive wife of Rama, the hero and god. One day in the forest, Sita was abducted by the demon king Ravana, who dragged her off to his kingdom in what is today Sri Lanka. After a great war, Rama defeated Ravana and rescued his wife, only to reject Sita as the spoiled goods of another man, “a sacrificial offering polluted by a dog.” As Sita listened, horrified, Rama told her, “I undertook the effort of war only to clear my name and that of my family. I am not able to stand your presence, even as a man with sensitive eyes cannot stand the light.”
    Sita insisted that she had remained pure. “I am not what you take me to be,” she implored. “Ravana’s body touched mine as he carried me off, but am I to blame for that?” She requested that a funeral pyre be built, but when she threw herself into the flames, the gods miraculously rescued her. This was divine proof of her