I had barely turned 20. In the first year of post-graduation, one evening, I returned home to my grandmother’s happy chatter. In her mind, I was already married to the boy next door, whose family’s proposal she put across.

“He has a palatial house” – these were her first words. She beamed from ear to ear, and asked me if I was interested in marrying him.

I was taken aback. I was not sure. I put forth a subtle excuse. After all, I was young, and still at university. She should at least let me complete my education. It worked. I heaved a sigh of relief. But not for long.

I hail from the eastern suburbs of Mumbai. My town is dominated by conservative Gujarati families, and I belong to one of them.

From that day on and 10 years later, I have considered marriage proposals from at least 20 men and met around half of them. A few months before my grandmother came to me with a proposal to marry a rich boy, whose family my family was “familiar” with, my parents had asked me to break up with a school friend whom I was dating.

My school friend and I thought that we were deeply in love with each other. When my parents got a whiff of this, they confronted me, one scary night, and asked me to cut ties with him. Dating in our community is taboo. My mother was upset because I was seeing a Jain boy and we are not Jains.

Since childhood, I had heard my father and grandmother shun girls who wore short clothes or dated men. I was brought up to believe I should dress conservatively. This means covering all parts of your body when you venture out, be it with a salwar kameez or a tomboy “avatar”, of jeans and T-shirt.

I believed I would get married by the age of 28 and have one baby at least by 29. None of that has happened. All I did in the quest was meet men with whom I never thought I could get along, let alone marry. Every time I met a man, my family was trying to set me up with, I had a ray of hope. Of finding true love, of a man who loved to write letters as much as I do, who read literature that we could discuss together or one who had deep love for cinema and poetry. I never met anyone with any of these traits in my community.

On some days, I was in for a shock. I had an arranged meeting with a guy from London when I was 24. I had often insisted on such meetings being between the two potential partners, minus family involvement. More like a date, where we get to know each other better. We spent a good 12 hours together gallivanting all around south Mumbai, from the heritage precincts to the sea promenade. He was making international calls amid our many stops, to have a beer or walk along the roadside book market. He told me he had a French girlfriend back in the UK. I accompanied him to buy books for her. Apparently, she adored Chetan Bhagat.

Later that evening, I asked him about his previous girlfriends. His exploits were numerous. He had previously dated a “drop-dead gorgeous Romanian girl”, he told me.

He later asked me to meet him again. At the second meeting, I kind of liked him and the idea of marrying him was appealing. I was in a dilemma. We had a serious meeting a few days after. He told me he would break up with his girlfriend to marry me. I refused. Six years since, he is still dating her. He told me his parents were pressuring him to marry within the community and they would come down to meet me at my office.

By the way, I was a fairly successful mediaperson by then, and faced a choice. To give up on my dreams and aspirations to marry a person I was not even sure about, or continue enjoying life in the “single” mode. I chose the latter.

I asked him a simple question, “Why do you want to marry me?” Pat came back the reply, “You are an obedient girl.” I thought to myself, even though it seemed like that to him, I was far from it. Someone should ask my parents how phenomenally I rebel. And since then, life has been a series of rebellions, from taking solo trips across the globe, almost always for work, to dating persons of my choice with the hope that I will truly fall in love with that one man one day, and he too will fall in love with me.

And marriage, ahem, has been put on the backburner for now.

This story was published in the Patriot.