Like the characters in her favourite book, Pride and Prejudice, Meeti Shroff-Shah hoped to find her Mr Right in the most romantic of circumstances. “Perhaps bump into each other at a bookstore or cross paths at a party,” quips the 33-year-old, who works as a creative consultant in Mumbai.
But reality had a strange and more humorous tale to spin. From an IITian, who gave her a sales pitch instead of a marriage proposal, to the painfully shy diamond trader who brought along a spokesperson, Meeti in Do You Know Any Good Boys?, holds the spotlight on our culture’s most-revered institution of arranged marriages.
At the age of 24, Meeti agreed to the conventional idea, one that her parents quite gently and sensibly put across to her. “Though they were extremely supportive, the whole process was frustrating and disconcerting. Here I was, a modern, educated woman, who was well-travelled, well-read, agreeing to this mundane agreement that stood against everything I believed in,” she says.
It was 2009 and within two and a half years, Meeti had met more than 40 matches (she stopped counting after sometime), wasted a lot of Sundays meeting prospective grooms-to-be and finally learnt the trick to survival — a thriving sense of humour. “In between the dates, I would sometimes wonder what I was even doing here. There were numerous meetings that were exasperating and I think, it was this ability to laugh at the situation that helped me make it through them,” she says.”
But little did Meeti know that her love story would bear affinity to the world of Jane Austen, where the protagonist had once said, “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.” On her very first date with her husband, she sensed that something was different.
“There was this strange sense of calm, as if some part of me knew that this was it,” says Meeti, who has been married for seven years and has a baby. “The book, which took two years to write, is for single friends who are not uncomfortable with the idea of arranged marriages. I keep telling them, it doesn’t matter whether you meet someone on your own or through your parents, the important thing is whether you are happy to have met them.”
