My Matrimonial Biodata, Annotated
A line-by-line confession of what 'homely and fun-loving' actually meant.
My mother described me as "homely and fun-loving" to forty strangers before anyone asked me whether I was either.
The document was two pages long, printed on glossy paper at the photo studio near the vegetable market, the kind of place that also laminates degrees and prints banners for retirement parties. My aunt composed it. My mother edited it. My father paid for it. I saw it for the first time when a copy fell out of a physics textbook I was giving away, three months after it had already been mailed, forwarded, and WhatsApped across two continents.
It had my photo on it, taken at my cousin's wedding, cropped so that the arm of a girl nobody wanted to explain was still faintly visible on my shoulder like a ghost.
I have kept it. And because I am a writer and cannot leave anything alone, I have annotated it. Line by line. This is the confession.
Name: Arjun Malhotra. Accurate. The last uncontested fact in the document.
Complexion: Fair. I am not fair. I am the color of strong tea with not enough milk, which is to say, the color of most of my country. My aunt defended this line by pointing out that the photo studio had already brightened the picture, so the text simply had to match the photograph. Lies, once laminated, become policy.
Height: 5 feet 11 inches. I am five feet nine. My mother explained that everyone adds two inches, so subtracting them is the reader's responsibility. The biodata, I learned, is not a document of facts. It is a document of agreed-upon inflation, like a currency.
Education: Convent educated, MBA. The MBA is real. "Convent educated" was included because my school had the word "Saint" in its name, though the only nun I ever saw was in a painting near the principal's office, and she looked disappointed in all of us, presciently.
Profession: Well settled in a reputed multinational company. I was a junior analyst who ate lunch alone at his desk and had once cried in the office parking lot, quietly, over a spreadsheet. Well settled.
Hobbies: Reading, music, cricket. Here the document commits its greatest crime, which is not lying but rounding down. I did not have hobbies... I had a secret. At 2 a.m., after the spreadsheets, I wrote poems. Bad ones at first, then less bad. Poems about loneliness, mostly, which felt too specific to say out loud in a house where everyone was busy marrying me off. Once, without telling a soul, I entered one into a monthly poetry contest under my own name, which felt more dangerous than any of the lies my family was printing about me. "Reading, music, cricket" was the beige paint my aunt rolled over that entire wall.
Nature: Homely and fun-loving. These two words cancel each other out and nobody has ever noticed. Homely, in the dialect of the biodata, means: will not embarrass us. Fun-loving means: will not embarrass us, but pleasantly.
Family: Respected, God-fearing, well-cultured. We once did not speak to my uncle for two years over a dispute about a wall. The wall was eleven feet long. The silence was longer.
For eight months the document did its work. Photographs arrived in envelopes and inboxes. Phone calls happened in the good room. I sat through four meetings in four living rooms where I performed the character my aunt had written, which was easy, because he had no interior life, only a complexion.
Then came Naina.
Her family sent her biodata first, the standard artifact: fair (she wasn't, thank God), slim, homely, B.Ed. My mother approved. The meeting was set for a Sunday at their house, with samosas whose oil I can still feel on my fingertips if I concentrate.
We were granted the customary fifteen minutes alone on the balcony, just the two of us, a drying towel, and somebody's tulsi plant. And Naina, instead of asking about my job, pulled a folded paper from her kurta pocket and handed it to me.
It was her own biodata. Annotated.
In the margins, in blue ink, in handwriting that slanted like it was walking into wind.
Next to "Fair": Beige at best. See for yourself.
Next to "Homely": I burned rice on Thursday. The smoke alarm and I are close friends now.
Next to "Hobbies: cooking, embroidery": Actual hobbies: arguing with the news, teaching other people's children, reading three books at once and finishing none of them.
Next to "Fun-loving": Depends entirely on the company. Prove yourself.
I stood on that balcony holding the first honest document I had seen in eight months... and I started laughing so hard that her father looked up through the window with the expression of a man watching a transaction go wrong.
"Your turn," she said. "Annotate yours. Out loud. You have eleven minutes."
So I did. I told her about the two inches, and the parking lot, and the nun in the painting.
And then, because the balcony felt like a confessional and the tulsi plant was clearly not going to judge me, I told her about the poems. The 2 a.m. ones. The contest. The fact that "reading" was an alibi for the truest thing about me.
She was quiet for a second... Then: "Recite one."
"Absolutely not."
"Two lines. You owe this balcony two lines."
I gave her two lines of a poem about my grandmother's sewing machine, the one that still smelled of machine oil and turmeric. She did not say it was nice. She said, "Slant rhyme in the second line. Interesting," and I understood, with the sudden clarity of a man whose glasses have been cleaned for the first time in years, that I was in enormous trouble.
A biodata is a poem in which every line is trying its hardest not to tell the truth.
We got married fourteen months later. Not because our documents matched.
Because our annotations did.
At the wedding, my aunt took full credit, and honestly, she was not entirely wrong. Her fiction brought us to that balcony.
But it was the marginalia that made the marriage, and I have tried to remember the distinction every year since: the printed lines are what you present, the blue ink is what you are, and nothing real begins until somebody hands you the second thing. Eventually I wrote about that kind of love too, the unbrightened, uncropped, five foot nine kind, and those poems turned out better than the lonely ones, though they were much harder to end.
Both biodatas live in the bottom drawer of our steel almirah now, stapled together, hers on top. Some nights, when I cannot write, I take them out and read the margins instead.
Next to "Nature: Homely and fun-loving," in blue ink, in handwriting slanting into wind, my wife added one word on our first anniversary... and I have never printed anything truer.
Annotated.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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