Sathya Saran - Knot for Keeps: Writing the Modern Marriage

Knot for Keeps

Writing the Modern Marriage

edited by

SATHYA SARAN

Contents

T his is an anthology on marriage.

But then, what is marriage?

A marriage is a bond between two people. It might indeed be made in heaven, but has to be conducted on earth.

Marriage is a partnership between equals. If both partners understand this, they can create a little heaven.

Marriage is a balancing act. Sometimes one side is heavy, at other times the other. In such instances of asymmetry, it is required that there be complete understanding, so the balance can be restored to mutual benefit.

Marriage is communication. It requires talks, gestures and many small but significant signs that all go a long way to help navigate the long road of togetherness, which often hits rough patches and tough times. Communication keeps the carriage moving it is the oil that lubricates the wheels through the journey.

Marriage is understanding. That both can be right and wrong at the same time. That there is more than one point of view. That Mars and Venus were terms coined by an astute mind to make this simpler to understand.

Marriage is never going to bed angry, a rule that has saved many a relationship.

Marriage is the courage to admit a mistake, the ability to say sorry.

Marriage is sharing, caring, growing together. Learning from falls and mistakes, and not blaming the other even if they are blameworthy.

Marriage is never saying I told you so.

Marriage is not licence to ignore, or take the other for granted.

Marriage is not a house with walls of silence dividing the partners.

Marriage is not a game of one-upmanship.

Marriage is not a social media event.

Marriage is not romance and roses. It is a gift richer and more lasting, that needs constant care to keep growing.

Marriage is not the beginning of happily ever after. It is the first step towards making ever after happy indeed.

And of course marriage is more. Much more

So, here then is a collection of stories, essays, thoughts and perspectives on marriage. Reading it can be fun it can make you laugh, cry, sigh or rejoice. Much as being married makes us do

O ne day, at the beginning of the year that I turned twenty-four, I wept terribly as I came to terms with the knowledge that I would never be a young mother, the thing I had wanted all of my life. When my birthday arrived a few months later, I spent most of it with a couple who did not want me to be alone that day. At some point that afternoon, I leaned over or looked down during our conversation in a garden caf, and noticed how ones big toe softly caressed the others. They were both smiling, and a feeling of having intruded flared in me: Even when keeping me company, they were alone together, whereas I was alone solely. As I write this, eight years have passed, but I have not forgotten the memory of accidentally sighting their feet casually grazing one anothers under the table, and how it made me feel.

This much deeper into an unpartnered life, this is the second thing I must tell anyone who wonders how this paradigm is possible the ache will not go away.

But before that, here is the first thing I must tell anyone about finding a meaningful paradigm for an unpartnered life: It is possible.

Why should the natural state of the adult human being be partnership?

Let me be very clear. To reject marriage is not the same as to reject partnership. There are plenty of people in committed partnerships who prefer not to marry for any number of reasons legal, ethical, emotional and otherwise. But to be unpartnered despite the desire for it, even with political sensibilities that critique the institution, is an experience of its own. The sharply honed critique does not fill certain voids; it does not put its arm around you as you sleep; it cannot slow-dance with you or hold your hand on a turbulent plane. But what it does is recalibrate your own sense of self-worth and how you move in the world, what you make possible for yourself and for others.

To arrive at the state of non-partnership as a socio-political tool, one must work backwards, beginning with the interrogation of the institution of marriage. There is extensive feminist literature on the same, which tackles not just the deeply problematic nature of heteronormative household dynamics but also everything from sexist etymology (did you know the English word husband has its roots in agriculture, from Old Norse words that meant someone who owned and tilled land, the woman being a part of his property, and from which the term husbandry, as in animal husbandry, comes from?) to the clear-cut sexism of many ceremonial wedding customs we are now conditioned to think are romantic. Each patriarchal culture has its own set of specificities. In India, the practice of dowry despite its criminalization and the continuing legality of marital rape are but two.

The deep intertwining of marriage and sexuality must also be challenged. Consider the absurdity of the term pre-marital sex. What is that except the presumption that sex before marriage is out of the norm because marriage is an eventuality? These are not theoretical issues not when youre a sexually active woman in need of gynaecological attention, for example. Chennai the city I live in and, significantly, spent my twenties in is notorious for pharmacies refusing to stock emergency contraceptive pills. There is no logic to it besides moral shaming.

The profound shame of being a sexual woman, that shame deeply enforced by family, peer groups, ones own lovers, random strangers, workplaces, authorities and organizations of all kinds how that doesnt radicalize more people into feminism, I do not understand.

Heterosexual cis-men benefit from marriage, a fact even health studies have proven. Is it in their best interests to challenge the institution? I would argue that it is. Subjectively, to have more equal partnerships is to have a richer life, and more broadly, to contribute to social justice is also to have a more meaningful life. But for women, the interrogation of matrimony and the prevailing systems it is built on and sustains is more than just a cerebral or experimental exercise. It is necessary for the survival of the sovereign self. Unpartnered or otherwise.

When I was five years old, my father reprimanded me gently once: If this is how you disobey your father, is this what you will do, when you grow up, to your husband? I hung my head and said, I dont want a husband then. I remember this so clearly. It was a moment of awakening, of dual clarity about what it meant to be a wife, and about how certain I was that I didnt want such a role for myself. And as vexed as I have been by some of my failures in affairs of the heart, I also know there was never a time when I carried myself otherwise. I wear this like a scar on the chest, at once a matter of pride and a terrible wounding.

In India, seven decades since the end of British colonial rule, we like to think both love and feminism are Western imports, and are wrong on both counts. To work towards a homegrown political consciousness about the problematic institution of marriage, it is B.R. Ambedkar we must go to first. In a paper delivered at Columbia University, in 1916, called Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, he said, As for myself I do not feel puzzled by the Origin of Caste in India for, as I have established before, endogamy is the only characteristic of Caste and when I say