Mismatched expectations on the marriage market

In the Netflix original Indian Matchmaking (2020), a Mumbai-based traditional matchmaker Sima Taparia tried to help rich people of South Asian descent in the US, Delhi, and Mumbai find the right partners.

The television series received mixed responses. Some called it an accurate representation of how traditional matchmaking, which is heavily casteist, elitist, and, of course, only for cis-het people, works, and others thought the series showed “Indian culture” in a bad light. But, like other releases on Netflix, it was binge-worthy not only because of its participants’ interesting story arcs and matching criteria but also because of its inherent voyeuristic quality. Among all the participants, however, one person stood out: New York City-based lawyer, and founder and owner of the luxury travel company My Golden Balloon, Aparna Shewakramani.

While some viewers found Aparna “hard to please’, “picky”, or someone who, as Sima notes, thinks “finding a life partner is like ordering from a menu”, others championed her for speaking her mind. But when Aparna, the character on the show — whom everybody seemed to have met and known already — started taking control of the real Aparna’s life, she thought to tell her story the way she wanted. She’s Unlikeable: And Other Lies That Bring Women Down is that attempt.

There’s always more to a person who we see on screen, and this book proves just that. Though its chapters are titled as if it’s a self-help book, it’s a well-written account by someone who has been through an awful lot for being herself.

Beginning with a failed date in LA, the book covers myriad things: Her “Semester at Sea”, how she and her family survived Hurricane Katrina in 2017, her love for travel, the racism she faced, and her perennial quest to find “someone” in today’s love market. And most importantly, and expansively, her experiences during the making of Indian Matchmaking and its aftermaths.

In the book, Aparna takes immense pain to explain why her mother called Srini, Sima’s first proposal, a loser, how she started receiving hate messages on social media from “crazy people,” and why it has been cathartic to tell her own story. She makes it clear that she was not paid for doing the series. Not only that, but she also ended up spending “thousands of dollars for my own hair, makeup, and outfits” and took “paid time off from my hectic job as general counsel of an insurance brokerage firm”.

While it’s engaging, comforting, and even entertaining to read this book, it leaves more gaps than it fills. First, being such a mature, professional woman didn’t Aparna know that while it was her “goal” to find love during this matchmaking process, the experience was being taped to be consumed by the world? And, for whatever the worth of the episodes, there were bound to be reactions. Second, in the way this book gets into confrontations, one after the other, it appears that it was written to manage image and perception and not a manifesto for women that it subtly claims to be. Also, in this book, clearly, the villain is Sima Aunty. Aparna calls her out (and rightly so) for problematic things that she said or did, but it’s hard to digest her defence of Richa (the participant whom we see in the last episode) who preferred being matched to someone “fair-skinned”. Sample this sentence: “So, when Richa spoke to Sima candidly, she included this preference that she most likely heard in her own home from her own parents her whole life.”

If that’s the case, then let me play devil’s advocate here: Isn’t Sima’s nature reflective of her own upbringing in a heteropatriarchal world where she, like many other women, put their husbands’ and their families’ happiness before their own? How different, then, are these two “preferences” from each other, given that they get nourishment from the same oppressive source, Indian culture?

In the book, Aparna also accuses the show and its creator of editing out her “story” to suit the narrative and present her as a villain. This begs the question: Being an attorney, didn’t Aparna negotiate the terms of engagement in this whole matchmaking exercise? If what appears on the screen is not her truth, then why didn’t she act against the creators? But you won’t find answers to these questions in the book because it’s about the it-depends-on-how-you-look-at-it part of its blurb. Sometimes what we claim as truth is only a story, pretty much leaving the reader to figure out what She’s Unlikeable is all about.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based independent queer writer and journalist. Instagram/Twitter: @writerly_life.