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by: Robbie Clipper Sethi
Publisher: Bridge Works, 1996
Reviewed by: C. J. S. Wallia
The Bride Wore Red: Tales of a Cross-Cultural Family by Robbie Clipper Sethi (New York: Bridge Works, Bridgehampton 1996) 216 pages $19.95 (516) 537-3418 Reviewed by C.J.S.Wallia [C.J.S. Wallia, Ph.D., teaches in the Publishing and Editing program at the University of California, Berkeley extension and is the editor of The IndiaStar Review of Books, www.indiastar.com]
The Bride Wore Red is a collection of 13 short stories, several previously published in magazines such as the California Quarterly, The Literary Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. The stories focus on the marriages of three Euro-American women to immigrants from India; and as the three men are cousins, this extended family of stories reads like a novel. The author has personally experienced a similar cross-cultural marriage (and so has this book critic). Born in New Jersey, Robbie Clipper Sethi did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a Ph.D. degree in 1981 and met her husband Davinder Sethi, who was raised in New Delhi. The novel´s opening story has the narrator, Sally, describe her arrival in New Delhi to meet Deshi´s family. As a medical-school graduate, Sally quickly recognizes that the mother´s repeated faintings at the airport are feigned. The mother "gazes at her son like a lover. He hasn´t disappointed her a bit. You have. She looks at you through a veneer of resignation. Her eyes glow; her lower lip is barely trembling. And well she might fear you. Her son has defied her to risk this marriage between East and West. And isn´t that what you wanted in a man all along." Although the opening story´s second-person point of view and the detached voice distances the narrator at first, her wit soon engages the reader. The title story´s opening sentence sets the tone: "You´ve stayed with Deshi because he is the only man you ever wanted who did not require a wife to play dumb to make him feel smarter." Throughout their marriages, the conflicts the three cross-cultural couples encounter arise not from their idiosyncratic personality traits, but primarily from the normative traits of their cultures.The Indian parents expect that they would be welcome to stay at their sons´ homes in the U.S. for many months, even permanently, as a joint family. Predictably, the Euro-American wives adamantly resist any such prolonged intrusion into their privacy and want the husbands´ parents out. The sons are caught in-between.
===================================== In the epic "Ramayana," Rama does not soliloquize about whether to obey or not to obey parental decree of fourteen years´ banishment, even though Rama knows that has not brought this punitive exile upon himself. How long will the normative traits deeply inculcated in the Indian psyche remain unchanged among the Indian immigrants in America? Not long, suggests Robbie Sethi in her story "Bridgewater Burning Ground." ===================================== This is best exemplified in "Grace," a much anthologized 3500-word story (including Norton´s "New World of Literature" and, in Marathi translation, in "Stree"). Grace is a part-time painter, who supports herself waiting tables, "resenting every minute away from the easel, her feet aching, a constant ringing in her head." She meets Surinder at a party in Philadelphia and invites him to see her paintings. "Surinder liked photography; he´d be willing to spend some of his salary on paints and canvasses." But her parents disapprove of cohabitation. " ´What is he,´ her mother asked, ´a Hindu?´" "Her father said, ´At least he´s not a Catholic.´" With this comment, Grace´s parents disappear from the story. Grace and Surinder get married in City Hall, "the statue of tolerant, immigrant William Penn standing over them." Surinder goes to New Delhi to gradually break the news to his parents and older sister that he´s already married. They accept resignedly and arrange a quick religious ceremony. Robbie Sethi brilliantly foreshadows Grace´s epiphany toward the end of the story: In New Delhi, Grace "smelled the dung smoke drifting in from the streets. The urge to capture that smell got her up. She sketched the sunlight coloring the cement walls of the courtyard, but then her father-in-law sat down beside her. Her mother-in-law came to advise her to take the bath while there was still hot water. Surinder´s sister leaned over her shoulder to admire each stroke. Grace finally slammed her pad closed, packed it in her suitcase, and began to count the days until she could re-create in peace the orange and golds she had glimpsed on the streets of Delhi." They return to Philadelphia, where "Surinder left her alone, the only man who had never tried to tell her what to paint. It was the most productive summer Grace had ever had." However, in the fall, Surinder´s mother, Bibiji, comes to Philadelphia. "Every time Grace opened a tube of paint, Bibiji coughed loudly. Toward evening she banged pots in the kitchen." After two months, Grace asks Surinder when Bibiji would leave. " ´I can´t tell her to leave,´ Surinder said. ´In India a parent is always welcome.´ " The mother stays for eight months. The following fall, she returns along with Surinder´s father, recently retired. A little later, Surinder´s unmarried 40-year-old sister also arrives. Now Grace is regularly expected to drive them to the shopping center. With these distractions, she "can´t concentrate on a simple sketch" and takes off in her car "to scream at the highway for two hours before she felt spent enough to come home."
Grace moves her canvasses to the basement of the three-bedroom home. But with "the floorboards groaning under Paenji´s [Surinder´s sister] weight, Bibiji´s shouting from the kitchen...the smell of onions, spices, and simmering meat drifting down the stairs," this solves nothing. She takes up a part-time job teaching drawing, saves her salary, rents a studio, and moves out. She starts a new series of paintings: "gray, lugubrious faces, their eyes mere holes." After three weeks, Surinder calls. His parents "need to feel they tried to reconcile us. It´s how things are done in India." Grace tells them: "This is not India!" "Rushing into the classroom one morning she [Grace] found Darji [Surinder´s father] peering at a student´s sketch. When he saw Grace, he took the turban off his head and placed it on the floor at her feet. Grace snatched it up and held it out to him. His thin hair wrapped in a bun on top of his head looked more naked than her model. ´What are you doing?´ ´I am elder of the family,´ he said. ´I forbid you to divorce my son.´ ´Class canceled,´ Grace said. Darji fell on his face in the threshold. ´I have humbled myself.´ he said. ´Witness: I have touched my daughter-in-law´s feet!´ Grace´s students stared, clustered behind Darji." Grace puts off filing for divorce for "she loved him. She always would. But she´s loved other men. She´d gotten over them. Such memories could be sweet, productive." Her new memories produce paintings, first, of "a gray-faced man, abstractly outlined with a skeletal jaw, a hanging, startled mouth, and big, uncomprehending eyes." And next, "two gray-white faces, women, with just a touch of yellow. Elongated, the figures stretched from crown to abdomen as if they were hanging from the skyline behind them. They wore the same wide-eyed stares as the man, but she managed to work a touch of comprehension into the women´s eyes." Grace tries to reconcile with Surinder on her terms. She invites him to the studio, but he doesn´t come. " ´If I stop by,´ he said, ´I´ll be caught in the middle.´ "
Grace returns to her painting of the two women. "The lines of her portrait blurred in front of her. She tried a wash. By nightfall she had managed to blend the foreheads of the women into the cityscapes behind them. They no longer stood out as distinctive figures, individuals, together; they were disappearing fast into the big, gray city. Still, the painting needed something. Grace opened a tube of primary red, put a dab of paint on the tip of her finger and touched a dot above each figure´s eyes." Several Euro-American critics have remarked on Surinder´s passivity. This is indeed a crucial cross-cultural contrast. In the Indian tradition, parental authority is not to be questioned. In the epic "Ramayana," Rama does not soliloquize about whether to obey or not to obey parental decree of fourteen years´ banishment, even though Rama knows that he has not brought this punitive exile upon himself. How long will the normative traits deeply inculcated in the Indian psyche remain unchanged among the Indian immigrants in America? Not long, suggests Robbie Sethi in her story "Bridgewater Burning Ground."
Hermeet, another cousin, who has lived in America many years and is married to a Scandinavian-American woman, thinks it unnecessary to travel back to India for immersing his father´s ashes in the Ganges. " ´Someone will take them,´ Hermeet said, patting Babhiji [his mother] on the arm. But Iqbal [his uncle] was afraid: if only sons could not take time to immerse their father´s ashes in the holiest of rivers, the fates of the sons would not be kind--in the next life, if not in this." In "Missing Persons," Robbie Sethi plays with metafictional techniques. She starts out with a female character, Leslie Powers, switches her sex, creating Leslie Powers III, a physician. Concurrenly, she switches Surinder Singh to Surinder Kaur. The author teases by starting one story, dumps it, starts another with a new situation and the characters´ sex changed, and then reverts to the previous story, and so on. I found this switching annoying, precisely because of her marvellous narrative skill--she had gotten me into each version so rapidly. Robbie Clipper Sethi´s "The Bride Wore Red" makes an excellent contribution to the burgeoning literature on intercultural marriage in the global village.
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