With roots in long ago, she grows in new light
Veena Rayapareddi lived her youth in the shadow of India’s culture. A dowry. A marriage to a man she didn’t know. She has stepped out of that life and into self-discovery.
By VANESSA GEZARI
Published April 15, 2005http://www.sptimes.com/2005/04/15/Citytimes/With_roots_in_long_ag.shtml
The first man had skin the color of charcoal. He sat in her living room drinking tea. She was 16, home early from school, and her legs trembled beneath her silk sari.
After he left, his parents sent their regrets. He wanted someone taller, with lighter skin and a bigger dowry.
The second man came with his mother. He didn’t talk. His family, too, wanted more money than her parents could give.
The third man brought a crowd of relatives. They asked about her music lessons, her studies. She answered shyly, her voice low, her eyes on the floor.
Their relatives talked on the phone. They consulted astrologers, negotiated. One afternoon she sat on the porch while her mother braided her hair.
“They liked you,” her mother said. “They come from a good family. What do you say?”
Veena Rayapareddi shrugged. A month later, she was married.
Veena came of age in a changing India.
In a few years, Bollywood movies would grow racier. More young Indians would marry for love.
Couples would begin choosing to live apart from their parents, breaking with centuries of tradition. Indians who had traveled abroad would return, wearing tight jeans and listening to hip-hop, speaking in strange accents, craving cappuccino and pizza.
The change didn’t come soon enough for Veena.
She grew up in Visakhapatnam, a modest city on India’s east coast. While some of her friends dressed in western clothes, she wore heavy silk skirts and gold necklaces. Every day, her mother rubbed oil into her long dark hair and twisted it into braids.
She wasn’t allowed to swim because her mother thought bathing suits were revealing. She wanted to take dance lessons, but her mother refused. Instead, she learned to play the vina, a string instrument used in Indian spiritual music. When she played in public, she sat on the floor, her expressions masked by heavy makeup, her body hidden beneath voluminous silks.
She wasn’t allowed to be alone with boys or talk about them. For fun, she and her girlfriends went to the beach and waded into the water with their clothes on.
“Look at us,” she said recently, gazing at an old photo in her Harbour Island condo. “So innocent.”
In India, marriage is the center of life, the reddest part of the rose. It is the subject of thousands of movies in dozens of languages. It lives in myths and dances, in music, in the stone carvings on temple walls.
From the time she was born, Veena’s mother planned her wedding. She dreamed about it. She collected dishes and silks and piled up gold for Veena’s dowry.
In the summer of Veena’s 18th year, her aunt moved in to help shop and cook for the wedding. They stitched blouses and prepared for an onslaught of relatives. Five hundred people were invited.
Veena’s legs and arms were waxed. Her hands and feet were painted with henna. She was married at night in a deep magenta sari heavy with gold.
She had no expectations.
It took her three years to decide she wanted a divorce. She spent months trying to convince her parents.
The house filled with relatives. Every day, they wore her down. At night, she lay in bed, thinking of counter-arguments. In the morning, she used them.
“That’s how I actually learned to stand up for myself,” she says.
For a long time, only her family and close friends knew about the divorce. When she moved to the United States seven years ago, she didn’t tell people. Even the men she dated didn’t know.
In America, divorces happen all the time. How could she explain how extraordinary hers was? No one in her large extended family had ever been divorced. To this day, she is the only one.
Among Indians, her divorce defined her. If they knew about it, everything else - her skill in marketing, the steely nerve that brought her to America by herself, the ambition that led her to earn two master’s degrees - would be secondary. She didn’t want to tell them either.
Veena does Web design, market research and strategic marketing for an IT company with offices in Florida, Virginia and Hyderabad, India. She goes to trade shows. She handles advertising in industry publications and newsletters.
Last fall, the Tampa Bay International Network was looking for a speaker. The subject was women, and someone suggested Veena. She is vivacious, outgoing, a savvy career woman from a country where most women don’t work outside the home. A natural choice.
She spoke in February. By then, she knew what she would say. The only way she could talk about women in India was by telling her own story.
In 1989, after her wedding, Veena lived at home while she finished college. Her husband was 11 years older and worked in a different part of India. They saw each other rarely.
A year after they were married, he moved to North Florida to study engineering. For a while, she lived with her in-laws. Finally, she flew to the states to be with him.
They had a small apartment. Veena sat at home watching soap operas. She cleaned and cooked.
She asked to attend classes at a community college. She couldn’t drive, so he took her and picked her up. Her in-laws complained that she wasn’t making money, so she got a job at an Indian grocery store. Her husband pocketed her wages.
She used to wake up in the middle of the night and stand at the window, crying. She felt like a prisoner.
"I was like, "I’m 20. Look at me,’ " she says. “We never used to go to the movies or out to dinner. He was totally, totally different from me.”
They argued. Once or twice, he hit her. Then he would rub balm on the wound to soothe it. She guesses he was sorry.
They started talking about a divorce. It was almost unmentionable in India, but she was determined. Besides, she had been thinking about someone else. He was a boy she grew up with. They had always liked each other and kept in touch by letters.
Back in India, her husband presented her father with a bill for every cent he had spent on Veena. He deducted the amount from her dowry and gave the remainder back to her family.
She moved back in with her parents and enrolled in an MBA program in her hometown. She and her childhood sweetheart grew apart.
She got a job as a market research analyst and moved to Virginia. Two years ago, there was an opening in the Clearwater office. Veena took it.
In Tampa, she has a life her parents couldn’t imagine.
Her friends come from Bulgaria, Colombia, Norway.
She speed dates.
She stays out til 6 a.m. on the weekends.
At the beach, she only wears bikinis.
She belly dances.
Veena knows what her mother would say: The dress is too provocative, the pants are too tight, the shirt is too small.
In Tampa, Veena is what one of her friends calls a “man-magnet.” Back in India, her mother cries every day because she isn’t married. Her mother even went as far as to shave her own head and offer her waist-length hair as a sacrifice, a plea to the gods that Veena would find a husband.
In the fall, Veena’s family consulted an astrologer. He said she should wear diamonds and gold and say a prayer every morning.
Soon, a diamond ring arrived from India. Veena wears it on her right hand.
She told her mother that in America, a diamond means you’re engaged. If she wears the ring, no one will think she’s available.
“In India, it’s not like that,” her mother said. “Wear it anyway.”
On a recent evening, Veena sat at an outdoor table at the Starbucks on Howard Avenue. She had just come from belly dancing class, and she wore a black jog bra, a zip-up sweat shirt and sweat pants. She ordered a caramel macchiato and breathed the cool evening air.
A male acquaintance at a nearby table called out and waved to her. She waved back, her eyes flashing. She had nowhere to go, no one to cook for, no one but herself to take care of.
Veena’s mother sometimes asks, “What’s the point, if you don’t have anybody in your life?”
Veena wonders: “What’s the point of being desperate?”
She wouldn’t mind settling down if she found the right guy.
“A guy who would give me all the attention,” she says, “and know why I am the way I am.”
Vanessa Gezari can be reached at 727 893-8803 or [email protected]
Veena Rayapareddi
FULL NAME: Veena Venkata Lakshmi Parvathi Rayapareddi
AGE: 33
STAR SIGN: Gemini
BIRTHPLACE: Andhra Pradesh, India
JOB: Marketing manager at Avineon Inc., a technology company based in Virginia
ACE STUDENT: She ranked 14th out of 4,000 people taking an entrance exam for the MBA program at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam in 1994. Among women, she scored highest.
BOOK SMARTS: She has two master’s degrees, including a master’s of science in engineering management from George Washington University.
FLUENT IN: Telegu, Hindi, English
FAVORITE COLOR: White
GOD ON HER DASH: Venkateshwara, an incarnation of Vishnu.
FAVORITE MOVIE: Fight Club
TAMPA HANGOUT: Ceviche Tapas Bar & Restaurant
IN HER FRIDGE: White wine, asparagus, Thai fish sauce, ginger-garlic paste, brie cheese
DOESN’T TOUCH: Ice cream or chocolate
[Last modified April 13, 2005, 16:39:09]