Most evenings, in the quiet hour when her father sat in the only comfortable rattan chair in the front room of their rented apartment, drinking his three pegs of local whiskey before dinner, and she and her mother sat on the floor, her mother darning frayed shirt collars and cuffs and Anjali tapping out hit Bollywood songs on the family's heavy harmonium, with its chipped keys and scuffed bellows, the dreams were almost enough.
'I shall find a good boy this time,' Mr. Bose promised his wife regularly. 'Your father wore out the soles of his sandals looking and looking before he found me. I am prepared to do the same.'
He answered scores of matrimonial ads in the two Bangla-language papers. Angie didn't expect him to snare a single worthwhile candidate-he was a railway clerk, after all, not even a regional director-and the fact that he was still restricting his attention to a tiny fraction of available boys was just fine; her back-door escape plan was not in jeopardy. All the same, some siesta hours while her mother snored in bed next to her, she allowed herself to daydream that maybe a Bollywood hunk, a Shah Rukh Kahn or Akshay Kumar, would find her irresistible during the marriage interview and would deposit her in Mumbai, Canada, or America. In daydreams, even Dubai seemed bearable.
Everything about the Bose flat, especially the front room, where any interview would have to take place, depressed her. This room, the larger of the two, was furnished with a mattress-covered wooden chowki, which served as seating for visitors and as a bed for her father, a glassfronted bookcase, and two wooden office chairs with uneven legs. A grimy, rolled-up tent of mosquito netting was suspended above the chowki by its four loops from nails hammered into the plaster walls. The only wall hangings were two calendars, a current one with a flashy picture of Goddess Durga astride a lion, and a useless but auspicious one from ten years earlier, which had been current in the year her father had received his last promotion.
Her parents' continual squabbling made it hard for her to improvise bouncy Bollywood beats on the old harmonium. It was her lone feminine grace, hence, important.
'I'm not despairing yet of finding a decent jamai,' Mr. Bose kept saying between sips of whiskey. 'If your father could find someone like me, I can find someone equally good.'
The silence was deafening.
'My father received many, many decent proposals,' Mrs. Bose protested. 'From day one. I could have married an actuary and lived in a big house in Patna.'
'No actuaries,' Anjali declared. 'No dentists, no professors either.'
'Who asked you?' Mrs. Bose shouted.
'And nobody from an armpit town like Patna!'
Mr. Bose made a menacing gesture, slipping the sandal off his left foot and holding it up as though he meant to strike her. 'You think you can give ultimatums to your elders? Maybe I should marry you off to a village schoolteacher-would you approve of that? Iron his dhoti under a banyan tree every morning?'
'She's an obedient girl. She'll do what you tell her.'
'You think my family and my salary are not good enough for an actuary or a tooth puller?'
'She is a Vasco graduate.'
'Useless.' Mr. Bose snorted.
'Drunk,' said Mrs. Bose.
'Why only Bangla ads?' Angie demanded. 'Why not English papers? I'm too good for any guy taking out ads in any Gauripur paper.'
'You see what state you've reduced me to, woman, by not bearing sons? All my brothers are fathers of sons. But me? Two donkeys for daughters.' He would never own a house, not with two daughters, two dowries, the larger one already wasted.
'Ill luck is ill luck.' Mrs. Bose clutched at her throat. It was not the proper time for Anjali to bring up the known fact that sex determination is male-linked. 'But this one isn't donkey-headed like…'
Mr. Bose was on a roll. 'Donkey for wife, donkeys for daughters!'
'You're not wearing out your sandals, you're wearing out your tongue!'
She took hope from her father's proven incompetence. One failed marriage in the family, although her father took no blame for it, had weakened his authority.
For Anjali, he could no longer muster the pinnacle moment, the operatic ultimatum that he had risen to with her sister. She remembered the cold precision of that final night, after weeks of shouts and slammed doors: 'I have told his father you will marry this boy. Astrologer has spoken, horoscopes are compatible. I am printing the invitations. There is no more to be said!' Her sister had run to her room to cry; her groans had filled the house.
'Give me a knife! Give me poison!' she'd screamed.
Then she emerged two hours later, pale, dry-eyed, and submissive.
'You are right, Father,' she said. 'I have been behaving badly.' She'd dressed herself in a new brocade sari and raided the stash of dowry gold. Arms heavy with bangles, earrings brushing her bare shoulders, necklaces and chokers disappearing under the sari-fold into her bosom, she said, 'Just as you see me now, so will you see me when I am dead.'
Anjali remembered the chaos of the marriage ceremony itself. Invitations had been delivered to every Bengali family in Gauripur, but the presents were tawdry-outdated saris, cheap purses, re-gifted lemonade sets, an electric table fan, and nine flat envelopes, each containing 101 rupees in cash. Because Angie had a neat hand, her parents had assigned her the duty of keeping an accurate record of the wedding gifts. The food had run short, drawing churlish comments from the bride groom's party. The priest had abbreviated the marriage rites and afterward complained about the poor quality of the silk dhoti-punjabi he had received from the bride's stingy family. A troop of hijras had shown up in their gaudy saris, with flower wreaths, plastic baubles, and bright lipstick on their leering male faces. They extorted money for their stumbling dances, frightening the children and even Anjali with their lewd sexual gestures, their deep voices, their braided hair and spreading bald spots. Her wedding, Anjali vowed, would have glamour and dignity.
And so it went, with variations, night after night in the Bose household. But during the day, with Mr. Bose away in the office, Mrs. Bose hatched new plans. 'In six months,' her mother practically chirped, 'you will be a married woman.' She reeled off common Kayastha-caste surnames: a Mrs. Das, Mrs. Ghosh, Mrs. Dasgupta, Mrs. Mitter, Mrs. De, Mrs. Sen, Mrs. Sinha, Mrs. Bhowmick. 'You will have a new house in a new city with a new family of brothers, sisters, and parents. You'll become a whole different person.' As appealing as a new family might sound in the abstract, it surely meant future entombment.
Mr. Bose didn't have access to a computer at work and did not know how to use the Internet. He asked around for help, for anyone's son or daughter who might have a computer to come to his rescue, but the computers were in the college and the college was on summer break until the monsoons started. Neighbors suggested names, everyone recommended Bengaliweddings.com as the most reliable website with the widest distribution. There was a boy in the neighborhood, Nirmal Gupta, called Sure-Bet-IIT Gupta, a classmate of Anjali's and a genius with computers. Go to Nirmal, the Boses were told. Truly, it takes a village to marry off a daughter. Mr. Bose sent the word to distant relatives in Kolkata and alerted managerial-level colleagues at work that he was on the lookout for a jamai for his number-two daughter.
All of the adult mysteries were about to unfold, her mother told Anjali. One's secret fate, hidden behind the stars, would suddenly burst forth like a seed in fertile soil, nurtured by sun and rain. The One True Mate whose destiny had been waiting for this glorious conjunction since the beginning of time would materialize in all his worshipful strength and beauty.
This was parent-talk from the other side of the great modern divide. Mrs. Bose was silent on what Sonali, in her first month as wife, saucily confided to Anjali about men's 'animal nature.' The sisters had giggled over Sonali's graphic descriptions of marriage-bed drama. Angie doubted that her father, even in his youth, had been endowed with animal nature. Her mother could not possibly have ever expected, let alone experienced, conjugal delirium with her father. Angie wished she could ask her mother what shape her dreams of married life had taken before Mr. Bose had become her bridegroom. Her mother had married at seventeen. The senior Mrs. Bose, her mother-in-law, did not want a vain, ambitious, educated woman in the family, so she had demanded that the girl drop out of school just a month before graduation. Anjali's mother had hoarded that grievance, polished and buffed it to radiance over the years, and brought it out to great effect during domestic squabbles. For her father, marriage was a sacred duty; for her mother it was an accumulation of insults and an avenging of hurts.
But for Sonali, as Sonali explained to Anjali on their rare secret reunions, successful marrying off of one's
