Bad Luck Bride

I'm not sure when I first learned about this particular tidbit of Pakistani culture - it could have been through my Mian, educating me about where he came from, or it could have been in one of the many fiction and nonfiction books I read about Indian and Pakistani culture. In any event, at some point I heard that when someone gets married - let's say a guy - and if, after the marriage and the new bride's arrival into the (presumably multi - generational) family home, bad things start happening in the family, it might be attributed to the new bride. As if SHE is bad luck, and it is her addition to the family that is actually bringing about the tragedy or loss or hardships. She might end up kicked out of the house, divorced, or worse, just because of superstition and poor timing. I had already learned of this before engagement and our wedding.

Then, not two weeks after our wedding, after me, Mian and his parents have moved into a tiny, 700 square foot apartment to live together for several weeks, M got a phone call from Pakistan saying that his Nana, his mother's father, had died. I was suddenly tasked with comforting my mother-in-law while she was terribly upset about the loss of her father while she had - for the first time ever in her life - lwft the country without him. He would be buried wirh a day and she would never get to say goodbye, never get to see him again. Her only closure was that one phone call.

Still though, I didn't think about the bad luckt hing. Not until two weeks later when M got another phone call. This time I wasn't there, I'd returned to college for the beginning of a new semester and wasn't scheduled to return to my new husband for two weeks. The phone call was to inform M and his parents that his uncle Puppa, M's father's brother, had died.

This time I didn't have to console anyone, at least not in person, though I did speak to my FIL on the phone. I was rendered impotent several states away. And this time I had plenty of time to think about the bad luck bride thing.

To my in-laws EXTREME credit, they never not once not ever said anything even hinting at the idea that I might be a bad luck bahu. Not then and never since. And if you think about it, they wouldn't even have had to believe it to have tried to use it as an unscrupulous advantage. Had they viewed their son's marriage with an American as something truly terrible that they needed to prevent by any means, surely after only two weeks the death of the family patriarch would have been used to try and convince their son to back out of it now, before I could cause any more damage. I've heard stories of horrible inlaws - or maybe they're not horrible they're just desperate to keep their family safe from an impending trainwreck of the unknown - who would do just that.

I was reminded of this last night when we were all looking through old pictures from M's first visit back home after coming to the US for graduate school. He went back for three weeks in December 2000 years before I even met him, and Nana and Puppa are in the pictures. I never met them of course, but I've seen so many pictures that I can still point them out, and I pointed them out fot Dulhan who also never met them. She asked when it was that they passed away and the answer for both is "just a few weeks after N and I got married." So I gave her a "Let's move on from this topic" pleading look because even if my inlaws are lovely and its been eight years since then, I still would rather superstitiously prefer not to highlight the connection.

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