Another piece from Zameen…
Author: Humeira Afridi
I have been married seven years and three months or six years and nine,
depending on which wedding I take as my point of reference. Having
either option has actually proved more confusing than convenient and
consequently, my husband and I, at a loss as to when we really got
married, have the dubious distinction of not having celebrated a single
anniversary on any of the sanctified dates.
The haphazardness began when as a sophomore at Mount Holyoke, I
discovered post modernism. Intrigued by the fluidity of tradition in global
economies, I would have scoffed at anyone who suggested we were a
nation still obsessed with marriage. It was only months later that
foregoing my original plan to take New York by storm with a bunch of
dorm-mates during Thanksgiving break, I instead braced myself, on my
family’s prodding, to visit a set of long-lost cousins who had migrated to
the United States decades ago.
I returned five days later, engaged – of my own choice – to be married to someone I didn’t know, much to the
puzzlement of my parents (then based in Abu Dhabi) who had only met my fiancé Ahad, once when he was a scowling
10-year-old, and to the subliminal horror of my feminist friends who thought I had "absolutely lost it."
For my husband and I, it became quietly clear during a conversation three days in to my visit that ours was a meeting
of minds, a match destined to take place, and thus when he proposed the following day, I thought, "Hah! A post
modern rendition of the arranged marriage!"
Our decision to get married was not about submission but rather about subversion, at varying levels. It defied the
codes of modern-day dating and thus brimmed with novelty; it negated the claim that women either marry men or
their careers (I went right back to college to do an MA followed by a full-time career). The novelty of being engaged in
a snow-ridden hinterland in somebody’s drawing-room over a hot cup of tea and cake and my husband’s
grandmother’s engagement dupatta draped over my sweater and trousers for the sake of tradition (and for the
camera), was deliciously unceremonious.
For many Pakistanis, the obvious next step would have been to make preparations for the wedding "back home."
However, we were faced with a dilemma: how does one orchestrate a Pakistani wedding when the bridegroom,
essentially an Iowan, upholds Midwestern values anti-pathetic to the hullabaloo of eons-old tradition, while the bride,
on the other hand, a rootless expatriate who left Karachi at the age of 11, secretly craves the pomp and ceremony of a
traditional wedding? Tussles over location were rapidly diffused by the ugly realisation that for our union to be kosher
in the United States, Ahad’s country of allegiance and my soil of residence – we had to first have an American
wedding.