Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India by Anita Jain

After many casual encounters and failed relationships, Jain, the daughter of Indian emigrants to America, finds herself childless, alone and distraught at 30, and accepts her parents' help in finding a man — a quest that takes her to Delhi for a year.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

You are a single woman in your thirties, fed up with the singles scene. You are tired of singles dinner parties, and exhausted by phone calls, e-profiles, and forced dinner conversation. You fear you will never marry. What do you do? Anita Jain, a New York-based Indian-American journalist, is just such a woman. Even her parents despair of her and have logged her details on to an Indian dating internet site. For years she has trusted the Western way of finding a husband, but maybe there's something in arranged marriages after all. It certainly can't get any worse. So she's travelling to India in search of a perfect husband. "Marrying Anita" is a refreshingly honest look at the modern search for a mate set against the backdrop of a rapidly modernising New India. Will she find a suitable man? If so, will he please her nosy parents, aunts, uncles and cousins? Is the new urban Indian culture all that different from New York? And is any of this dating worth the effort?
By simply recounting her parents' journey to the West, the tension between their values and those of the society she grew up in and how it confuses her love life in both continents, Jain weaves together the rise of post-colonial India, the sexual dysfunctions of the post-feminist West and her chequered romantic record into an intimate and expansive book. Economics, politics and history mingle with tales of bad sex, no sex, female angst and male incompetence to form a complete and insightful picture of 21st-century womanhood.

She's frank and straightforward about her relationships and one-night stands but doesn't cast herself as a victim or temptress: "I do not consider myself a good lover. I may even be a poor lover. I am neither extremely generous, nor inventively acrobatic. I'm not terribly experienced or irresistibly sexy and I'm far too interested in postcoital affection". Most of the sex is banal, but Jain finds the human truth that motivates it: "We talk, and as we talk our clothes come off, more out of comfort than lust. Soon we are naked and Vikram is talking about his wife." Her wry flat prose has the jaded melancholy of a woman who mistakenly uses sex to find love but, knowing her mistake, continues her search because she profoundly believes in it — a faith ironically inspired by her parents' long and mutually adoring arranged marriage. She writes beautifully about her parents who, despite decades together, have, in a peculiarly Indian fashion, never said each other's name aloud, referring to each other as "he" and "she".

In 1961, as Westerners begin their experiment with drugs and sexual freedom (which Anita inevitably embarks on herself), her father graduates, only to be "slapped with the full centripetal force of India's despair". A talented, educated man, stifled by the poverty and bureaucracy of post-independence India, he suffers panic attacks until he resolves to leave. His mission almost fails when he falls a mere 300 rupees short of the sum he must deposit with the US government, but Richard Nixon devalues the dollar on the eve of his departure, removing the shortfall. Full of such details, the book reveals how exposed lives in the Third World are to the everyday ebb and flow of history.

Jain contrasts Western men with Indians without moralising. She finds Westerners sexually open and adept but emotionally closed; Indians, the exact opposite. She learns to appreciate India's honest if unromantic dating game, where people cut to the chase, stating their intention to marry in the first five minutes. Equally, she laments the handsome Indians she invites home who then keep her talking till dawn.Her search for Mr Right takes us on a vivid tour of modern India and its extraordinary contrasts. In Delhi, she lives more lavishly and freely than in New York, while her maid earns less than $20 a month. Jain is a keen observer of India, its idiosyncrasies and bitter ironies, making this book much more than its title could ever suggest.