Note:   Here’s  a piece that I did that appeared in the August 1, 2008 issue of India Abroad.   The filmi connection comes toward the end:

Some people consider scaling the side of a mountain as a daring act, for others it’s scheduling two dates on the same evening.

And then there’s what Anita Jain has just done: Write a memoir that unflinchingly details her relationships thus far in her thirty-something life, as well as chronicle a year of her experiences in search of a husband back in India, the land her parents left to emigrate to the US decades ago.

Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India has just been released in the U.S., and the author is currently visiting New York to celebrate, and do some readings.  

The release of Jain’s memoir marks a significant milestone in a whirlwind process that began in late March 2005.   At that time, an article by Jain, a journalist writing for Crain’s New York Business, had just appeared in New York magazine.   The title of the piece was “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?” And, in it, Jain mused on the ups and downs she had encountered as a single woman looking for love in New York city, and the interesting turns that things took when she started receiving calls and emails in response to a profile her father had put up for her on an Indian matrimonial website (“Match for Jain girl, Harvard-educated journalist, fair, slim.”)  

In New York, Jain was meeting a wide and interesting variety of men from various nationalities and professions, but all seemed willing to go only so far – spending time together, maybe sharing passionate kisses or a more intense physical relationship – before balking at anything more serious or committed.

Jain details the immediate after effects of the New York magazine article: “It was great.   It came out on a Monday and by the end of the day it was the most emailed story of the day, then later, of the month.   By Tuesday I started receiving phone calls from people saying “˜Thank you for writing this; this is so about my life.’ And over the next couple of weeks, I was contacted by several agents to write a book.   The response was really overwhelming, and when a publisher that same Wednesday sent a letter to my house with an offer, I thought “˜Ok, it’s already begun and the ball’s rolling.'”

“Then I met with all these agents, and I shortlisted a couple and then I went with an agent that I really fell in love with.   I had already secured the job with the Financial Times in New Delhi, so we had a timeline.   It was great that the article had just come out because we knew that publishers would want to not wait.   I quit my job almost immediately and wrote the proposal over a long weekend, just sitting down 8 to 10 hours a day.   We went out with it maybe two months after the article came out, and we got immediate response.   Quite a few publishers bid on the proposal;   Sonny Mehta and Knopf publishers were one of those who bid.   It was sold on a Wednesday, and I flew out the next morning to India.”

And did it trigger a stampede of interested males?   “There was a sort of brief surge of interest,” Jain says, “I made a lot of friends, but there were not as many serious contenders as you would think.”  

And so, Jain set off for her new job in Delhi with another objective.   She writes:

People commonly go to India to find themselves or to find god, but I went to India to find a husband.   I would give myself a year, what I figured was ample time in such a marriage-oriented society”¦.I wondered if I would be able to find someone modern enough in their thinking to be comfortable with a wife having a great deal of her own agency, not just in terms of making decisions for the household but in having a full life outside the marriage – one that included going out with friends, drinking and smoking.   A woman who has had sex in the past – and not just with those two long-term boyfriends.   I wasn’t sure what I would find, but I owed it to myself to try.

After Jain establishes in her book why she’s setting off for India, reversing the journey that her parents had made many years before, she describes the process of getting settled in the capital city and hunting for an apartment, not an easy thing to do as a single woman living alone.   Many landlords fear there will be wild parties, many male visitors, and worse.

After an exhausting, and exhaustive, search Jain does find an apartment she likes, prompting her to wonder:   “Perhaps it’s not too dissimilar to my other search – finding a husband.   If you look persistently enough, without either lowering your standards or admitting defeat when you get turned down on occasion, you’ll eventually find the perfect one – and who knows, it might even come with a bonus terrace and an enchanting view.”

As Jain begins making friends, she notices, especially among the successful, hip men she meets, how comfortable they are in their own skin.   Some may work in call centers or other outsourcing businesses, but many others are musicians and journalists.   Along the way, Jain meets some who interest her, but in some cases either the timing is off and there are missed connections, or the feelings may not be entirely reciprocal.   It seems that today, in modern India, not so many men are marriage-minded.  

Jain says writing a memoir was not as easy as some might expect: “I never really understood why people talked about writing as so much of an emotional excavation, but you do really go deep. And you just have to keep going deeper.   I had always been a journalist but this kind of writing was so different.   It had so much to do with the self, and reviewing the self.”

She is fearless as she describes dates and those overnight encounters.   I wonder about her parents’ reaction to such frankness, but Jain says “My parents haven’t yet read it.   I am nervous.   No Indian or non-Indian child wants their parents to read about the things I’ve written about.   They’re very enthusiastic about the book but whenever they get really super-enthusiastic, I tell them to temper their enthusiasm because they may not like things I’ve written.   They’re kind of bracing themselves, but they’re not angry or upset.”

For the woman who was always the one asking the questions and telling others’ stories, Jain finds being on the other side of the equation something that comes with its own learning curve:   “I think it’s something that you ease into.   Then it slowly begins to dawn on you how exposed you are. The first few barbed comments or reviews you take to heart more, but then your skin grows thicker and you get used to it.  

“The hardest part for me is, I know I have a book coming out, but I keep forgetting it’s a confessional memoir.   (Laughs)   So not only can people take issue with the text, they can take issue with your life!   They can criticize you for the way you’ve behaved.   I think that’s the hardest part about writing a memoir.”

Never mind the confessional aspect of her book, some – for example at the popular desi blog Sepia Mutiny – have questioned the need for yet another book on the subject of marriage in the Indian community.   To this, Jain says:   “If I wasn’t the person who wrote this, I’d be groaning at another arranged marriage book.     Why do we write about these things over and over?  

“I think these are themes that are very personal and people want to hear about other people, what their emotional lives are like.   I think that’s going to be a perennial fascination.   I wrote the book because I thought it was different.   I think India does not have a large tradition of memoir.   If you look at Iran they have a cottage industry of female memoir.     I wanted to write something that was revealing of what a person can go through being Indian and having to deal with these issues.”

“Also, I wanted to include this large chunk about the new India.   Getting married was not the only imperative in the book.     It was also very important to me to represent a time and place.   The last three to five years have been fascinating in the types of changes you see.   Yes, Indian people have always divorced, they’ve always had sex, they’ve always drunk alcohol, but what’s different is that these things were always done by the upper classes, but now, it’s a middle class revolution and it’s those people who are now doing those things.”

Based on excerpts of the book that have appeared in newspapers like The Guardian, Jain has gotten messages from many NRI women.   “They’re all over South Africa, Australia, America, Canada,” she says. “They’ve dated Western guys, they’ve dated Indian guys and they’re going through the exact same experience.”

It will spoil the fun to reveal the delightfully surprising ending, or to talk of what or whom Jain’s search ultimately led her to, but for her future Jain says she does not plan to return to financial journalism.   Rather, she would like to move into film.     “There are a lot of Hollywood studios turning up in Bollywood now and there’s a lot of cross-pollination and I’d love to be part of that,” she says.

In addition, Jain is meeting with a Hollywood studio while she’s in the U.S. about a film version of her book.   Some possible actors she could imagine playing her onscreen?   Jain admits she likes both Konkona Sensharma and Nandita Das.   She then adds, with a laugh “Who’s the one who’s a size 0 now?   Kareena Kapoor!   But I don’t think she’d take the role “¦”¦ it’s not glamorous enough!”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  

Anita Jain’s favorite authors:

Jhumpa Lahiri

I came to Jhumpa Lahiri very late, in 2007, and I read Interpreter of Maladies and I didn’t fall over backwards like everyone else.   I didn’t read The Namesake, but the recent short stories in The New Yorker, the ones on Hema and Kaushik really got me, and then I read The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth back-to-back, and I think she’s an author beyond reproach.  

Hari Kunzru

I’ve recently been reading Transmissions, the main character is sort of an Indian nerd and I think the Indian nerd should be written about more, that’s something you see in my book.   The men I date are not these old money Delhi guys, they’re these New India tech guys that live in Gurgaon.   And Hari Kunzru’s main character is a Noida IT guy.   Those men are playing a big role in India’s booming economy and revolution.  

Sathnam Sanghera

I read recently a book by a young author in England who’s just written a memoir.   He’s this savvy, media intellectual who used to work at the Financial Times and now he writes a column for The Times of London.   Both his parents worked in factories and it’s about growing up in one of these places in mid-England, but later in life he found out both his father and sister were schizophrenic.   The book is called If You Don’t Know Me by Now.