![]() It could’ve been the redwood trees of fairy tales he was telling me about, but I chose to believe him. He told me about how he and Paris Hilton always went on joy rides in her limo whenever she was in town. Then we cabbed it down to Broome Street for eighteen-dollar margaritas. I once dated an obscenely wealthy investment banker who took me out for duck prosciutto sandwiches at ABC Kitchen near Union Square. Like many Indians of their time, my parents got married, bid goodbye to their homeland and settled anew in America, where, with time, they would become experts in American customs-all so they could will a better world to my brother and me. It is glorious in how long it has lasted and how much adversity it has weathered. My parents’ marriage is a beautiful, glorious partnership. Marriage was a milestone that acknowledged you had done all the things you needed to do as an irresponsible kid-and now you were beholden to carrying out your family name, to spawning another generation. I grew up viewing marriage as a prism through which we crossed over from youth to adulthood: To be married was to be a grown-up it was to position yourself to cross the next arc of your life, as defined by the purchase of increasingly large homes and a growing litter of kids. I grew up only ever knowing the idea that a man’s family and a woman’s family meet-they are agreeable to their children marrying-and then there’s about a week of ceremonies, food, and loud aunties cackling about something absurd that happened in their childhoods. Yet I’m not too torn up that there are no “Maahi Ve”s in my future. I could be a number of things to them: A Western corruption, a deviant, someone to avoid at parties-but never really a human who actually imagines himself tying the knot and settling down. Or, if they do, they don’t understand what that means. The cousins and relatives who exist in my periphery-and seemingly only when there is a wedding or a funeral that brings us together-don’t know I’m a queer person. We are Bengalis our weddings are somber affairs. There is no technicolor line of cousins and relatives lined up and dancing at my wedding to bombastic bhangra. ![]()
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