The text came somewhere over the Atlantic.
Mum: Will you be free on the 4th for dinner?
It took me a few seconds to remember what day is the 4th.
Ummm….I guess! Why?
Her answer came almost immediately.
Nothing. Just for dinner with some family friends.
I smiled to myself. I had heard this script before.
By the time my plane landed in Dhaka, I already knew there actually was no dinner. “Family friends” almost always meant a family with an unmarried son. The date had already been chosen. The introductions had probably already been made – just not to me.
This wasn’t the first time. In fact, every time I flew home, somewhere between the airport pickup and my first meal at my dining table after reaching home, there would be a carefully arranged invitation waiting. Sometimes it was lunch. Sometimes it was dinner. Occasionally it was a party I hadn’t known I’d been invited to until I arrived. For years, I thought I was simply coming home to visit.
The first few times I found it amusing.
There was something almost theatrical about the whole thing. My mother would insist I wear something nice with further elaborating. My father would advise me to be careful about my vocabulary. We’d arrive at a restaurant where another well-dressed family was already waiting, everyone exchanging the kind of smiles reserved for people pretending this wasn’t exactly what it looked like. Introductions were made over plates of biriyani and kebabs or sometimes if it’s too casual- coffees. We talked about politics, weather in America, work and whether I missed Bangladesh at all. The questions were harmless enough on their own, but together they felt less like conversation and more like the opening rounds of an interview.
I never blamed my parents for it. In their minds, they weren’t orchestrating an ambush; they were creating opportunities for their daughter. They had grown up believing that the right person often arrived through family, through community, through someone saying, “I know a nice boy”. To them my annual visit home wasn’t just a holiday. As I lived thousands of miles away, if any introduction were going to happen they had to happen while I was here.
I never blamed my parents for it. In their minds, they weren’t orchestrating an ambush; they were creating opportunities for their daughter.
What surprised me was how quickly my return home stopped belonging solely to me. Every itinerary acquired an invisible layer. A cousin’s birthday dinner might actually be an excuse for another family to drop by, a casual afternoon tea suddenly included guests I had never met. Even relatives who rarely called throughout the year somehow remembered I was in town and suddenly on a lazy morning they were at my home with an awkward smile on their face seeing me still in my Bugs Bunny PJs.
After a while, I developed a strange instinct for it. I could tell from the tone of my mother’s voice whether an invitation was genuine or strategic. And the funny thing is, I still looked forward to returning home. But somehow between unpacking my suitcases, I’d been wondering whose son I was about to meet. Looking back, I realized the marriage proposals were never really about me as an individual. They were about what I represented. I was someone who has studied and worked abroad, someone who had built a life elsewhere but still always came back. In the eyes of many well- meaning relatives, I became a bridge between two countries rather than two families.
Eventually, I stopped taking my mother’s invitations at a face value.
“Who else is going to be there?” I’d ask.
“Oh just us. And a few family friends.”
“Do they happen to have a son?” There would be a pause on the other end of the phone, followed by laughter that was answered enough.
We turned it into a joke. It was easier that way. I’d tease her or my father about these “dinners”, and she’d remind me that she was “only introducing people”. There was no pressure, she’d insist. If I wasn’t interested, I could simply say no.
No one ever forced me into anything. No one demanded an answer before dessert or expected me to leave the table with a wedding date. The proposals themselves weren’t oppressive. If anything, everyone was remarkably polite. What weighed on me wasn’t the introductions – it was what they slowly did to the idea of coming home into a series of performances.
The proposals themselves weren’t oppressive. If anything, everyone was remarkably polite.
But home should always be the one place where I could stop performing. But gradually, every visit carried a little more weight than it appeared to.
“How long are you staying this time?“
“Are you planning to settle in America?”
“Have you met anyone over there?”
Individually, they were harmless. But sometimes I wondered if this was simply the price of living abroad.
Distance has a peculiar way of compressing time. My relatives don’t see the ordinary Mondays or Tuesdays of my life. They don’t watch me grocery shop after 14 hours of work, complain about laundry, or spend an entire weekend working on my thesis and sobbing my eyes out instead of partying.
They only see me in snapshots, someone who’s going to leave again so every visit has to be urgent. I understand it now in a way I didn’t when I was younger. Sometimes I think about that text message waiting for me somewhere over the sea.
“Will you be free on the 4th for dinner?”
I know there will probably be another family at the restaurant. Another pleasant conversation over shared plates. Another well-meaning introduction for marriage that everyone insists is “completely casual”.
And I’ll go.
Not because I’m expecting to meet the love of my life over biriyani, but because saying Yes has never been about the proposal. As familiar as the traffic outside my childhood window, the smell of cardamom in my mother’s tea, or the inevitable text asking if I’m free for dinner on a particular date.
These days, whenever my phone lights up before a trip home and I see my mother’s name, I can’t help but smile.
I already know what’s going to show up.
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