(This article is a part of the web-exclusive series from our latest issue 'The Marriage Issue'. More from the print quarterly here.)
If you are a woman in Southasia, chances are that you've been told how to be one. If you don't have well-meaning relatives to tell you how, the media does the job instead. Recently, on a flight from Varanasi to Mumbai, I found myself being coached on the subject by an elderly lady. The topic, under discussion, slightly modified, was how to be a 'married' woman.
Ever since I chose to marry last year, I knew some haranguing was bound to come my way. However, what I hadn't accounted for was random strangers taking up the task of making a woman out of me.
I come from north India: a region notorious for putting its women in their place, either by force or by obligatory respect. Growing up, I was safely tucked away in boarding schools, and came back to this world only for two months every year. Yet this divided world of men and women was hard to miss. It was only when I came of age that some mention of me 'being a woman after all', even though in hushed voices, was suddenly audible in my own house. To my family's chagrin, I did not marry at 24, when my parents would have liked me to. I did so in my thirties and everybody collectively sighed in relief. Little did they know that I had married for my own reasons, not theirs, which has left the harbingers of marriage inconvenienced.