There’s a version of my life that was decided a long time ago, and I had nothing to do with it.
It goes like this. I take over the family business. I stay in Mauritius. I marry a nice Indian girl — the right kind, from the right kind of family. We have a big Indian wedding, the kind people talk about for a year afterwards, and then I settle into the life that was always waiting for me, like a coat that was bought in my size before I was old enough to be measured.
Nobody ever sat me down and said all this. That’s the thing about a plan like this — it isn’t announced, it’s assumed. It lives in the way my mother says when you’re settled instead of if. In the way the shop is talked about as something I’ll “one day” run, never as a question, always as a date that hasn’t been filled in yet. In the photos of other people’s weddings that get shown to me a half-second too long.
I’m thirty-two. I’m not unhappy with my family. I want to say that clearly, because anything I write after this is going to sound like I am. I love them. They’re good people who worked hard and built something real, and the life they’re holding out to me is, by every measure they have, a good life. That’s what makes it complicated. They’re not offering me a cage. They think they’re offering me the best thing they have.
But here’s what I’ve never managed to say out loud at the dinner table: I don’t want it.
Not the business — or, not the business as a sentence I’m serving. It’s a shop that sells handmade model ships — beautiful, intricate things, sails and rigging and tiny hand-painted hulls. I can admire them. I can see why people love them. But it isn’t my world, and it was never going to be. I have my own field, the work I actually chose and feel alive inside, and no amount of duty turns someone else’s craft into your calling. The problem isn’t that the ships aren’t lovely. It’s that they’re not mine — and a whole life spent tending a passion you don’t share is its own quiet kind of loss.
Not the wedding I can already picture in perfect detail and feel nothing about.
And not the marriage that gets arranged the way you’d arrange a sensible merger — two suitable families, a match that makes sense on paper, everyone nodding. I can see why it works. I can see that it has worked, for a lot of people, for a long time. It just isn’t romantic to me. It isn’t mine. And I’ve started to think that a life that isn’t yours, no matter how comfortable, is a strange thing to spend your one life inside.
I don’t have this figured out. I want to be honest about that too. I’m not writing this from the other side of some brave decision. I’m writing it from the middle, where it’s messy and I still flinch when the subject comes up and I still haven’t said the thing I actually think. I suspect a lot of people are living in this exact middle and not saying it either.
So that’s why this exists.
I started this because I kept looking for someone writing about this — the very specific weight of being the child who’s expected to inherit a business and a future and a spouse, all pre-selected, in a small place where everyone knows your family. The diaspora kid. The good son. The one who’s supposed to be grateful, and mostly is, and also quietly is not. And I couldn’t really find it. So I’m going to try to write it.
I want to write about the dinners where it comes up. The wedding I don’t want, described lovingly enough that you’ll understand why it still scares me. What “a good match” means to them and what romance means to me, and the canyon in between. The things people say to an unmarried thirty-two-year-old here, which range from funny to unbelievable. And underneath all of it, the question I actually can’t stop turning over: whose life is this for?
If you’re reading this and something in your chest went oh, him too — then you’re who I’m writing for. You’re not the only one in this particular boat. I think the boat is a lot more crowded than any of us let on. We’re just all sitting very quietly, hoping nobody asks us when we’re getting married.
I’ll ask the questions out loud instead. Come back and we’ll figure it out together.
Leave a Reply