Lecturing

During my first trip to India in 2005, I met Pramod’s family who really did not know what to think of me. They were all sweet but uncomfortable speaking English as well as uncertain how to treat me. I came into their lives as an outsider who, while open to their culture, did not know much about it.

Pramod’s sister, Vedashree, who grew up with the custom of arranged marriage, felt it her duty to protect her little brother from this strange American who probably won’t be able to take care of him as a good as an Indian wife would.

One day Vedashree took me aside so that the two of us could talk and began lecturing me on my relationship with Pramod. She told me that everything I was feeling for Pramod was not real, that it was just infatuation, and that it was not a proper impulse to act on these feelings. Dating is not appropriate in her culture (boys have much more freedom which is why Pramod was free to be out with me). They are raised believing that love does not come before marriage. Love comes after marriage after learning to live with a person and respect him and wanting to take care of him.

Vedashree told me that if Pramod and I wanted to get married, it would be much more serious than I knew because “in India, people do not get divorced as they do in America.” She assumed that because I was an American, I would take marriage more lightly and get a divorce at the first sign of trouble as if divorce were as easy and acceptable as going to a store.

Her lecturing me about my customs which she believed to be naiveté was hurtful at the time. I just did not realize that she was only following what she had been taught to believe all her life.

***This is a picture of Vedashree holding her son (taken in the summer of 2008).