Everything Happens for a Reason
A witty, wry look at contemporary marriage and relationships, from the author of For Matrimonial Purposes.Priya, growing up in a comfortable home in Delhi, is the youngest of four sisters, but the first for whom a marriage has been arranged – the other sisters all seem to have had a variety of reasons against husbands. Priya moves to Los Angeles where her new family have been established for some twenty years and while no woman in her family has ever had a job, she decides that in America, she should find one. And that's when the trouble begins…Her charm and dignity, as well as her discretion and sympathetic ways, raise her from receptionist to key interviewer on a glitzy media magazine in a short time. She knows that while a little job is OK with her in-laws, a career, western clothes and interviewing male stars in hotel rooms would be absolutely forbidden. So her double life – American career woman versus traditional Hindu wife – begins, and her longing for a different relationship with her husband grows.Funny and serious, full of rich comments on the pleasures and absurdities of life-styles in East and West, Everything Happens for a Reason is a charming contemporary novel, from a wonderful and unique author.
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Everything Happens for a Reason
KAVITA DASWANI
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Kavita Daswani 2004
Kavita Daswani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007160631
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007387892
Version: 2016-07-21
All my gratitude to my agent, Jodie Rhodes, who gave me something every novelist needs: a gem of an idea. And to my editor, Susan Watt, and all the wonderful people at HarperCollins, for their enduring faith in me. Every author should be this lucky.
CONTENTS
No woman in my family has ever had a job.
No other female in my entire extended clan, as far back as I know, has ever leafed through ‘wanted’ ads and shuffled nervously in a seat while a stranger asked her about ‘job history’. What would she say? That her primary profession was to serve her father and brothers in early life, and her husband and sons later?
So I was completely taken aback when my mother-in-law prodded my stomach with a wooden spoon, complained that I was yet to make her a grandmother, and then insisted that I may as well be of some use and join the workforce.
‘America is expensive,’ she said, poking the utensil with such vigour that it was a rather good thing there wasn’t a baby in there. ‘This is not India. In this country everybody works.’
It didn’t matter that I was a newlywed, in the first flush of marriage, still unpacking the silk saris and silver goblets that had been part of my small but respectable trousseau. It didn’t matter that I was still getting acclimatized – not just to living in a strange country, with a man I didn’t really know, but also with his parents and his younger sister. And nor did it matter that, as far as I saw it, my most important role in this family was as housekeeper, cook and general errand-runner, duties that came along with my new position as wife and daughter-in-law.
All this, I had expected.
But I had never thought that somebody – least of all a ferocious guardian of tradition like my mother-in-law – would be telling me to go out and look for a job.
In generations of women in my family, I was going to be the first.
It should have made me feel like a trailblazer, a pioneer, a valiant example of a woman’s right to be independent.
Instead, the idea terrified me.
Whether by design or circumstance, my parents had never shown my sisters and me much of the world. To them, there was enough to see and do in India without us having to explore what lay beyond the borders of my homeland. It is the same limited vision, I suppose, that I soon realized many Americans have of their own country.
So getting off that plane two months ago at the Tom Bradley Terminal of Los Angeles International Airport, on a muggy day, was a shock in itself. I had stifled the instinct to wail all the way on the flight over, longing to be with my family again although I had just said goodbye to them. I had drifted in and out of restless sleep as watery images of my wedding, just days earlier, seeped through my subconscious. I was trapped in a middle seat on a packed aeroplane, my husband using my armrest on one side, and a large, be-turbaned Sikh doing the same on the other. I hadn’t even landed, yet already felt overwhelmed, squashed and small.
When we finally made it out to the airport, I was astonished by not just the huge
