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I’m not going,” the 30-something woman declared when the annual family winter vacation was being planned. Every year, like many Bengali families, the Rays liked to get away to some hill station or beach resort, where very often parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins and an assortment of other relatives turned up in droves, ostensibly to show solidarity, but really, as some members are convinced, to effect a change in venue for the petty squabbling that constitutes an integral part of day-to-day family life.
A subscriber to the latter view, the woman, however, did not put her foot down so much for this reason as for what she calls “the utter lack of etiquette towards the unmarried daughter in the family and in society”.
Last year, for instance, she found that like the children in the family, she had not been booked into a separate room. “I was expected to squeeze amicably in with those who enjoyed a more legitimate status in society such as ‘couples’, ‘the elderly,’ etc,” she says. And to her horror, she found that she was sharing a room with her newly-wed cousin. “Being a happy-go-lucky type, he had absolutely no problem with my sharing a bed with them. But I felt very uncomfortable when he started whispering sweet nothings into his wife’s ears in the middle of the night.”
If the copy editor at a publishing house felt slighted by this display of callousness as far as getting some respect is concerned, she is definitely not alone. Research scholar Ratna Gupta, 40, also complains of being treated like a child in the family in spite of her age and professional status just because she is not married.
“My parents, whom I live with, are old and I don’t mind running around doing chores for them, which they ask me to do. But then they have to remember that I’m not exactly a spring chicken either. So while commands such as ‘Can you run along and fetch some milk,’ or ‘Did you get the newspaper from the mailbox,’ are still tolerable, asking me to sing Amra Shobai Raja (Tagore’s We Are All Little Kings), as I used to when I was four to highlight my cuteness, is too much.”
Gupta is even more incensed because she finds that her younger, but married sister is treated with more respect. “I am very fond of my sister and it’s okay that my parents don’t ask her to get the milk or the newspaper when she comes because she doesn’t live here. But I don’t find them asking her to sing. If she’s around during a social gathering, it’s her five-year-old son who gets to do the honours.”
While both women agree that neither of the alleged offences are grievous, these are nevertheless symptomatic of a general lack of recognition of the rights of an individual who, to quote Robert Frost, took the road less travelled and, for some reason or another, didn’t get married. But why should that happen in the first place? “Anything that goes against the norms dictated by society is consciously or subconsciously considered an aberration,” explains sociologist Diganta Ray. “And since society places a great deal of emphasis on the institution of marriage, which is associated with commitment and responsibility, an individual who decides not to get married is often not accorded the respect and status that he or she may deserve as a responsible adult.”
The unmarried brigade —both men and women —couldn’t agree more. “Space is very important for me,” says Rupak Bandyopadhyay, 43, a general physician, “and I knew that I wasn’t cut out for sharing it with anyone. But my parents and relatives were after my blood trying to get me married, thrusting photographs of women at me every now and then and asking me to choose. Initially I tolerated it. Then I had to get rude until they backed off.’
And Anuradha Chatterjee overheard an officious aunt whispering to a friend of the aunt’s at a wedding, “She’s still a spinster. Do you have a good boy for her?” Chatterjee, a manager at a foreign bank, who has “no time” for a family, let alone such snide remarks at family gatherings, turned around and told them, to their shock and horror, to mind their own business. “Political correctness was never this aunt’s strong point,” she observes. “But ‘spinster’? Please.”
But not everything is limited to semantics. Eina Ahluwalia, a jewellery designer who runs her own ornament company, gives a poignant example of what she describes as society’s unwillingness to fully accept “an individual’s right not to marry”.
“My mother looks so much like me that everyone thinks we are twins,” she says. “But one of my clients came to my house where my shop is located and looked at her and then looked at me and said, ‘This must be your mother-in-law.’ For the client, Ahluwalia explains, it was “unthinkable” that she was unmarried — “after all I looked decent and seemed to have enough money and education.” So despite the fact that she was a spitting image of her mother, the client went on to assume the obvious.
Clearly, society continues to believe that marriage begets respect. Marriage is the magic word — and single, almost a swear word. | 
