Dear father, don't force me to marry. I'm not ready

You are no exception

You are almost a postgraduate from one of the most prestigious central universities of the country; you have had no real world experience except for having lived in the national capital for half a decade.

You are not special,  you are just an English Major. And your cousin - a junior engineer - has been good enough to marry a rich guy way older than her.

You survived Delhi

You have known a life where your friends looked up to your father as a "revolutionary" guy, someone who had dare to send his daughter 500kms away from home for her to study.

A laudable display of idiosyncracy, open-mindedness and optimism. You have headed your college and the department and learnt a million things. You would turn 23 by the end of this year. You have been a decent student with a first division throughout. You are capable of earning a self sustaining salary package, one that would qualify you to claim the coveted badge of the "independent woman".

Home a constant, no more

You have called back home twice each day by habit. You do not know where love receded, you do not know if your relations stem from obligations or attachments. You convince yourself that it is love. You have learnt to sound happy over phone, with umpteen things pulling you down to a new low each day.

You feel you are selfish, soliciting money each month and squandering it, but you forget to share the happy news and the perks of having worked as an intern, having taught students, having lived on the hostel refund monies, telling them instead you did not need any money for that month.

You have changed

You carry a phone, stay glued to it - for once you forget to listen to the rantings of the relatives, whose happiness has always been incomplete. You listening to them does not make them any happier or you any better. You have earned their displeasure by studying better than their sons, refusing many marriage proposals that were sent your way to tame you.

Yet you thought you are a member of a progressive, liberal clan that runs against the stifling current of the female aporia.

What went wrong?

Conversations started dying, you harp on those memories when you wore those sleeveless cotton frocks and were taken out for vegetable shopping. You did not realise when and why it could not anymore please so many of your relatives to see you walking around in your own house, with their acquaintances coming to visit so often.

You were never asked to cover your body or your head, your dress preferences have always been respected. You have had so many good female friends who called you, met you and had conversations with your parents, but that your first male friend coming for dinner to your place would ruin so many things for you, was not known to you.

Father, the only constant

You share your fears, your anxieties with a man who has seen the world, who believes in your capacities more than you think you can do. You, however, fail to fathom what made him retreat from that path to where he had led you by hand. He knew that he would want to see his daughter studying abroad, he had promised.

He wished so, and that feulled your enthusiasm. You do not meet the same man, for he has sumitted to societal pressure according to which a single woman can definitely not be sent alone to study in a "paraya mulk" . Though it sounds fantastical, he still wishes there still exist such clans where this kind of mentality is okay.  

Literature, a dystopia

You came to cherish literature through those beautiful cotton kurta-sporting and saree-clad, grey-haired professors, who either married late, or did not marry, or had unahppy marriages. You love them, idolise them. It appeared easy to unshackle the crumbling insitution from their feet. Did you then realise what it would mean?

Your graduation was the most beautiful time of your life. You did not have the slightest idea that you have embarked on a luring dystopia, catclysmic, irretrievable arena from where there was no coming back. Your language was Greek when you told these things to your relatives. You knew you would be a misfit.

Marriage, a reality

You knew you would see the disaster approaching, you were mentally prepared, perhaps.

However, it did dawn back then that you would have to make peace with acknowledging things that for long didn't matter. The reality had hit you when you read what Austen wrote centuries back, for what Nasreen got exiled and the reason why Ms Mehmud met her end. Your existence draws its essence from your identity of being a girl.

A man past thirty stands at your door to get married to you, a guy who is just a graduate, who has spent his life making money in the Middle East. You wonder not at the man but the society that has allowed and fostered such marriages.

You question why the society expects you, who is more competent, independent and educated than him to give your consent. You are silenced by the sheer audacity of the realtives to promote such a marriage alliance. You grow numb at the knowledge of your mother mentioning it to you. You are proud to have a father who listens to you having been carried away initially.

The bigger question

You are not angry at your relative or your mother but with the uneasiness of your identity. You had known so far that you are a girl, you have been a feminist in your own way, pampering yourself and giving yourself an edge over others.

You are not given to smoking, drinking and sexual indulgences out of your own choice. You are not a religious person. You have not hated men. You liked so many, befriended a few, and have loved even fewer.

You feel pained at the sight of your friends who fail to exercise their choice. You have loved your friends for their lifestyles, for they made you step out of your little cucoon. They unburdened you to a large extent of the cultural, self-sacrificing and selfless baggage that made people exploit you.

You have loved your parents, you know you still do.

However, the bigger question still remains. The question of why you are you being dragged down and made to cry after five years of "self-empowerment". You can not stand it when your mother questions you over phone about your love interests, since you refuse to get married. You fail to question the need of another man in this essentially heteronormative world where refusal of one man gives birth to another man, who must be the boy friend you called home for dinner.

You fail to question what you lack, why your height or your flabby body should qualify you to get married to any X, Y or Z. You fail to understand why having spent five long years in Delhi, having fought little battles for self and others, are you still seen as a girl who must be married into a respectable, rich family.

You fail to explain to your relatives your larger identity of an empowered, progressive, liberal, educated Muslim woman, the first one from the family to be sent to Delhi University to study and make her own choices.