By Piyali Bhattacharya
With news such as I have for this column, there is no choice but to just say it in the most direct fashion. So, here it is:
Last weekend, I got engaged! Thanks for the smile and the congrats… It was one of the best moments of my life, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. But immediately after the popping of the Big Question, came the slightly smaller question: to Facebook, or not to Facebook?

For anyone else, this would be a simple enough question: do I go for it and tell all my friends about the engagement at once, or do I wait and tell everyone I see in person?

Not so for your average Desi-American girl. See, putting something like an engagement up on Facebook is a highly politicized affair, and one that involves the consent of the entire family. There are things that must be taken into consideration, people’s feelings and reactions to be thought of. Most importantly, my parents had to face the decision of having their friends find out through their children (as Facebook news spreads like wildfire), or telling them each during a private phone call, explaining exactly who the boy is, what he does, how we met (details that cannot be explained via the internet, therefore leaving room for random assumptions to be made and then spread).

So we had a Family Meeting, the type that is only held for the most serious of occasions, to discuss how to play our cards correctly. On the one hand, there was the fact that if my parents were to sit down to phone everyone they knew, they would be hoarse by the end of two days, and may still not have finished calling every last Indian family they knew, and to whose children’s weddings they had been invited. On the other hand, announcing it on Facebook meant that all my friends and family could know about it and send messages to my fiancé and me, even if they were in different countries. But of course, then they couldn’t proudly list all of their intended son-in-law’s various achievements. As an anecdotal example, how then, would people know that at such a young age he had been hired as a Yale professor?

Of course, none of this would be an issue if we weren’t Desi. I am what you might call a “good Desi girl” marrying a very “good Desi boy,” but he’s not from my community. He’s not Bengali. Now, this is something that I will be writing many, many columns about in the future, because choosing a partner who didn’t speak the language I spoke with my parents has been one of the defining decisions of my life. But for now, I’ll just shorthand it and say that for many years, I was convinced that I myself wanted to be with a Bengali, since my parents put so much effort into making my Bengali perfect and accent-less, even though I grew up in the States. Not to mention, they pulled me out of school every year between the months of May and September and took me to Calcutta where I played with cousins, took lessons and generally forgot about my American school and passport. Having spent so much time in that city and having been raised by parents who firmly placed my identity in Bengal, I shocked even myself when I fell for a Panjabi. And since I myself had always wanted to be with a Bengali, I think my parents had started assuming I would be too. Before I met my fiancé, I had fully intended to have an arranged marriage (or maybe a better term these days is “assisted dating”… and again, the subject of Desi marriage is something many readers have asked me to comment on, and as I mentioned, it will be the subject of not one, but several columns over the next few weeks). But the very first day I met him, I knew something really special had happened. And so at the time, my family had had a Family Meeting (or several), similar to the one that was held a few days ago, the outcome of which was that they told me that they were proud of the person I had become and the choice I had made. They had understood what a supportive, talented and caring man I had come across, something that can be so rare.

Flash forward to our engagement last weekend, in which he drove me up to the Berkshires and proposed on the top of a mountain with the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen. When I called my parents from the top of that mountain, they couldn’t have been more thrilled. Excited screams burst forth from the telephone, and then demands to come home immediately so that we could celebrate together. Even so, after the excitement had died down, the issue of the mode in which to tell the larger Desi community of my choice of husband still remained. And that’s when the Facebook question popped its head up.

- What about the people who would ask my parents why I wasn’t marrying a Bengali, when I had partially grown up in Bengal?

- What would they assume from his very obviously non-Bengali name that would be tagged in all my Facebook photos?

- Would they wonder how my parents had reacted to it? How do I assure them that my parents were genuinely excited that I had found someone I was so incredibly compatible with?

- Also, how do I tell them that since meeting me, my fiancé had started taking Bengali lessons!?

All of these questions needed to be taken into account.

In the end, my parents encouraged me to share the news on the internet. “This day only comes once in your life,” my mother said. “Enjoy it and share the joy of it with as many people as you can.” I did exactly that. In addition though, these days every time I come home from work, Ma is on the phone with some ‘Aunty’, regaling them with stories of my mountaintop proposal!

About the author:
Piyali Bhattacharya is an American-born Desi writer who contributes pieces about South Asian American Feminisms to EGO every fortnight. Please send comments to her at piyali.ego@gmail.com or to EGO at info@egothemag.com