In Melbourne, as a student of Economics and Marketing & Tourism at Monash U, I had a successful and extremely satisfying career in community development (I won’t talk about it too much here but you can find out more by following this link ). A few things I have taken immense pride in have been the setting up of a night market in a less-popular, but highly multicultural part of town and initiating the United Wood Cooperative for elderly men from Africa. Sustainability was key in everything that I aimed to achieve and it is still one of the main themes of Forty Red Bangles. Of course, such accomplishments would have made any parent proud, as mine were too-but not as much as they would have been had I been married! Ask any Indian and you will hear that the marital expiry date of an Indian woman in 25 at most, and after that she is to be taken off the shelf and chucked into the spinster pile. I was approaching my late twenties and my sister (ironically voted least likely to get married!) had settled down at the age of 21- leading everyone to believe that I was a hopeless cause.
Such family pressures were often discussed with friends down at the pub, which led me to become increasingly interested in discovering the eccentricities in the lives of first and second generation Indians in Australia. The seed of an idea was planted, and this grew into a project that took an exploratory look at 1st and 2nd generation Indians in Australia. Hearing about my sudden interest in this topic, a friend expressed the desire to introduce me to a man named Anurag, who they jokingly told me was a Prince from Rajasthan, India. Now, with first impressions it can go either way- you can be absolutely spellbound or completely unimpressed. When I finally met Anurag at a pub called the North Fitzroy Arms it was, unfortunately, the latter. An innocent and eager Indian boy was no match for this headstrong Aussie- or so I thought! Time passed, we kept meeting, bottles of wine were shared, stories were exchanged and somewhere along the way we fell in love.
In July of 2004, we were engaged! Respective parents were informed and they were none too pleased. More than being of different castes, my parents were worried about me marrying into an extremely traditional Marwari family and his parents were skeptical of him marrying a woman not of their choosing and from an extremely untraditional Indo-Aussie family. This was all as full of masala as a typical Bollywood film, so with goading from a director friend, a documentary of Anurag’s and my story was to become the end result of the project I had embarked upon. We made the choice to be betrothed but a full-on Punjabi wedding in Melbourne cemented our union in front of our families and friends.
What seemed like a romantic notion at the time came with a tidal wave of repercussions that we could have scarcely anticipated. What happens next? Well you’ll just have to keep reading to find out!
Forty Red Bangles 