“God help those
Whom, God inevitably knows,
Have helped themselves...”
From Dakoonama
by Bachchoo

I was in the decrepit toilet of a South London pub called the Prince of Wales where I had gone to see a man about a dog. The PoW is the sort of pub in which you can a buy a joint of packed branded-name meat for half the price it commands in the very respectable supermarkets. The clientele of the PoW have a sort of Robin Hood philosophy.
It was snowing outside and the ceiling of the toilet was leaking rather copiously so one had to tilt one’s body to the side while executing one’s business or risk getting very wet.
Caught in this undignified pose, my mobile phone rang.
As I was expecting semi-urgent calls, I answered it.
“It’s Rob”, said the voice and it was a full two seconds before I recognised it. I know more than a couple of Robs and none of them had any telephonic tryst with me, but this one made me jump. I recognised it as the voice of my beautiful and talented eldest daughter’s boyfriend and instantly panicked in case he had some unwelcome news to report. Had she fallen in the snow and broken a limb? Was she stranded in Timbuktu?
His tone was apprehensive but not in the least foreboding.
“Oh. Hi, what’s up?” I asked.
“Tam and I are going away for a short holiday break to Bath and I want to ask your permission to propose marriage to her”, he said.
I had to gather my thoughts and regain my breath. This was an unexpected ceremoniousness from someone of this, what I think of as a callous, or at the least informal, generation.
“We have been together for four years now and I thought...”
I said I was delighted. He recalled the joke I never played on him but which he must have been told about by Tamineh. For my own sadistic reasons, when my daughters were teenagers, say 16, and started to bring boys who were their friends home I would threaten to ask the said boys in stern terms if their intentions were honourable: “Now then, young man, I demand to know if your intentions are honourable”.
I don’t think I ever actually went so far as to address any of the young men thus, but had a satisfactory time holding the threat of such embarrassment over the girls and having them plead with me to refrain from any such thing. (I would also threaten to declaim the poetry of T.S. Eliot loudly in an exaggerated Indian accent when their friends were gathered: “Apreelll is croolisht munth/ Breeding lilucks...” etc. and using the threat, extract all sorts of concessions about modifying their speech and altering the aspects of domestic or scholastic behaviour which I felt were wanting.)
Since Rob and Tamineh have bought a flat together, I suppose I expected them to announce either an engagement, a pregnancy, a change of job or some progress along the grihasth path in good time. What I didn’t expect was a polite and formal Victorian application of decorum. It was delightful and I was glad he did it. I stepped out of the toilet, a little wet from the leaking ceiling and bought a very generous round.
I kept Rob’s secret for the two days before Tamineh was proposed to and when she told me I congratulated her and said what daddies the world over say. And it was only then that from within some unplumbed depth of my personality that the Indian father emerged.
I began to think whether it could or would be a Parsi wedding and concluded that it couldn’t unless one found some very unconventional Dastur to do the needful. I began to wonder for the first time in my life (I have four daughters, all unmarried) about a dowry, whether it was appropriate in this context — probably not — and where it would come from if it was.
Even while I was entertaining these thoughts and anxieties, my wonderful daughter asks me “Dad, can’t we have an Indian wedding?”
Now that means a lot of different things to different people, but it conjured up a dread of what it might mean to Tamineh: a fantasy of some bedecked Rajasthani palace with a thousand guests jetted in from London. She was perhaps thinking of the much reported “Indian” wedding of a TV comic called Russell Brand or of Brad Pitt and his wife (they already have three children??) who have announced their intention to have some such ceremony.
How am I going to tell her that these huge weddings are held in India by Indians with advertised extravagance in order to spend “x” crores of rupees and receive “20x” crores of rupees in fake and falsified non-taxable wedding presents, thus converting “black” money into “white”? How am I to tell her that I have no black money (or for that matter blue or red or purple money) to convert into anything, despite having for years been a commissioner of programmes for TV on Channel 4, because unlike in some countries, Britain doesn’t (alas?) allow its TV channel commissioning editors to take bribes?
No, I won’t be able to do a Rajasthan palace wedding for Tamineh — or for Shireen, Jahan or Tir. They’ll have to live with that. They’ve all had a damned good school and university education — Tir is still at grammar school, a place she won through academic endeavour (and by having the appropriate intelligence and creative genes) — and have started on promising careers.
I had better stop this line of reasoning before I start to sound like a family-planning advertisement.
It stands to reason that Rob’s parents will want a say in all this and they may plump or push for a church wedding. Tam’s wonderful mum was born a Christian and I shall have no objections on the grounds that Zoroastrianism, according to the Christian texts themselves, in the persona of the three Magi, put their imprimatur and approval on the birth of Christ and that spectacular intervention of Ahura Mazda in the affairs of men by begetting the divine-prophet-man-child.
That the Christian world has forgotten or ignored our endorsement for the coming faith is as may be. If there is a Christian wedding I will prepare, as father of the bride, a little speech which points out our Zoroastrian endorsement and intervention in the affairs of all. My intentions will be impeccably honourable.