The Sex and the City lifestyle just weren’t working for Anita Jain. Three years of living and dating in New York filled her with nothing but loneliness and frustration. A child of Indian immigrants, Anita had always been less than receptive to her parents attempt at arranging a marriage for her, but after evenings with her potential suitors such as ‘the man who had no past’ and Alex wit the long distance girlfriend in Tokyo, she began to wonder if an arranged marriage could possible be any worse that meeting a man in a bar, at least their stars are aligned.
The pressure on Jain to find a husband started very early: a few days after her first birthday she fell out of the window of a three story building in Baltimore. Jani’s mother greatest concern at that time, after learning that her daughter hadn’t been gravely injured was her marriageability. At 32, well past the cultural deadline for starting a family, Jain admits that she is not ready to give up her happiness in favor of the self-determination of choosing her own mate, boards a plane for the impoverished, backward land her parents fled and and lands in Delhi,smack dab in the center of the new India, intent on finding a husband. What she discovers is a thriving sexy dance club filled urban culture not at all dissimilar from New York but with the added complication of existing alongside the traditional culture attitudes towards women and marriage that hold sway.
With hilarity and humility, Marrying Anita explores the wild and indefinable world of love and marriage – why we want it, how we find it, or don’t find it and how we live without it.