The novelist and the nawab

You can be sure Salman Rushdie’s remark about marriage, just two days old and already all over the media, will get into the quote books. The novelist told writer Kathy Lette of Elle magazine, “Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a marriage.”

Not many people can claim Rushdie’s expertise in matters of matrimony, considering he’s been in and out of it four times, but was that remark just “blather”, as a girl blogger described it? Perhaps. The world's funniest and most cynical quotes happen to be about marriage, and with this proclamation, Rushdie could unwittingly join the ranks of the bitter and the facetious.

Rushdie is among those who can joke about marriage. Not everyone can. For couples who’ve been through the matrimony wringer, being funny about marriage is as difficult as being funny about death.

Thoughts of marriage and death relate to a fear of the road ahead, and evoke demons that won’t go away easily.

Wajid Ali Shah, the nawab of Avadh, who was exiled by the British, makes the marriage-death connection poignantly in his famous thumri, Babul mora. The British portrayed him as a king given to song and debauchery, and threw him out of power. They forced him to leave his beloved city of Lucknow.

He wrote: O father, I'm forced to leave my home/Four men have arrived to lift my palanquin/My loved ones become strangers/And the inside of my home becomes unreachable/As I leave my father's home to go to my husband’s country.

Char kahaar mila/mori doliya uthave (four men gathered and lifted my palanquin) is the line that makes the marriage-death connection, and Wajid Ali Shah then extends the metaphor to other anxieties of leaving.

The four men who lift the wedding palanquin could well be the four men who carry the corpse to the burning ghats. The bride is gripped by the agony of having to leave behind people and places she loves dearly; she speaks in the language of one on the deathbed. And, of course, it is possible that these emotions sound fuddy duddy to those of us who grew up on Diana trivia and the wedding razzmatazz of Hum Aap ke Hain Kaun.

Rushdie said it would be nice to have weddings without marriages. He was kidding, of course, because weddings don’t address the demands of sex, companionship and children. It’s wishful thinking that you could have the ceremony without the trauma (and dare we say it, the joy) of living in a relationship.

Akka Mahadevi, the 12th century mystic, celebrated marriage in her exquisite poetry, but she was talking about a groom who only existed in her mind. She wanted nothing to do with flesh-and-blood men, and she considered herself betrothed to Channamallikarjuna, or “lord white as jasmine.”

Last week, MiD DAY ran a story about how weddings are collapsing because couples who hitch up online have unrealistic expectations, and feel betrayed when they see a side of the spouse they hadn’t imagined existed.

One story was particularly telling. A couple, married after an Internet courtship, started bickering when the woman realised her husband had lost his toes in an accident. She felt he had misled her by sending her photographs with his feet covered, and started insulting him for his “handicap”.

Would you blame this on the Net? The foolish desire to wear wedding finery? Or is it that just about anything can wreck a marriage?

The Independent reported that Rushdie was recently nuzzling an actress for a video shoot. Other papers have reported his romance with an athlete. After Wajid Ali Shah went to Kolkata, he spent his pension lavishly and contracted marriages with several pretty women. Both the nawab and the novelist got away without too much damage, and kept their sanity and creative urge.

So what’s Rushdie trying to say? Drape yourself in your splendid Kanjeevarams, but don’t imagine marriage is a katcheri?

Uh, it’s all very confusing, Sir Salman.