ter—at the Jurassic age of twenty-eight—finally got married. And this was a difficult girl to
marry off, too; she had a lot of strikes against her. I asked Tulsi what makes an Indian girl dif-
ficult to marry off, and she said there are any number of reasons.
“If she has a bad horoscope. If she’s too old. If her skin is too dark. If she’s too educated
and you can’t find a man with a higher position than hers, and this is a widespread problem
these days because a woman cannot be more educated than her husband. Or if she’s had an
affair with someone and the whole community knows about it, oh, it would be quite difficult to
find a husband after that.. .”
I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian soci-
ety. I don’t know whether my horoscope is good or bad, but I’m definitely too old and I’m way
too educated, and my morals have been publicly demonstrated to be quite tarnished... I’m
not a very appealing prospect. At least my skin is fair. I have only this in my favor.
Tulsi had to go to another cousin’s wedding last week, and she was saying (in very un-
Indian fashion) how much she hates weddings. All that dancing and gossip. All that dressing
up. She would rather be at the Ashram scrubbing floors and meditating. Nobody else in her
family can understand this; her devotion to God is way beyond anything they consider normal.
Tulsi said, “In my family, they have already given up on me as too different. I have established
a reputation for being someone who, if you tell her to do one thing, will almost certainly do the
other. I also have a temper. And I’m not dedicated to my studies, except that now I will be, be-
cause now I’m going to college and I can decide for myself what I’m interested in. I want to
study psychology, just as our Guru did when she attended college. I’m considered a difficult
girl. I have a reputation for needing to be told a good reason to do something before I will do
it. My mother understands this about me and always tries to give good reasons, but my father
doesn’t. He gives reasons, but I don’t think they’re good enough. Sometimes I wonder what
I’m doing in my family because I don’t resemble them at all.”
Tulsi’s cousin who got married last week is only twenty-one, and her older sister is next on
the marriage list at age twenty, which means there will be huge pressure after that for Tulsi
herself to find a husband. I asked her if she wanted to ever get married and she said:
“Noooooooooooooooooooooo.. .”
... and the word drew out longer than the sunset we were watching over the gardens.
“I want to roam!” she said. “Like you.”
“You know, Tulsi, I couldn’t always roam like this. I was married once.”
She frowned at me through her cracked specs, studying me with a quizzical look, almost
as if I’d just told her I’d once been a brunette and she was trying to imagine it. In the end, she
pronounced: “You, married? I cannot picture this.”