237. CHASTITY AND THE DESI GIRL

Dr. Froggy and I have been chatting for what feels like eternity (but in reality three months). I now take every second or third call from him, mostly when I am SO bored that I’d prefer to talk to him over dirt. Because my mother raised me to have manners, I spend most of the Dr. Froggy call fighting the urge to say, “Please stop taking about your Porsche and BWM. Because I got it, you’re rich. In fact you are SO rich your cars cost more than the average person’s annual salary in West Virginia.” And God help me (Durga can you hear me?!) if I have to listen to another story about his house modeled after P. Diddy’s crib. He has insulted my inner designer with faux-architecture so badly that she jumped off the GWB last week.

The fact that Town in Country is ignoring me helps me get over him. And there is the prospect of Tapan, the Minnesota Desi entrepreneur, who has asked me out for a date tomorrow! With some strange turn of events, I have become the desi juggler with 2.5 men (Town and Country is only getting half-credit for being in my dating circle).

This now leads me down a potentially complicated and never-faced before situation. With Tapan, I am about to consider dating 1 of 500 desis who can trace me back to my mother, which means for the first time in my life, Mom may learn about my desi dating antics. So I cannot act with wild and reckless abandon like I did with Town and Country. And let’s not forget that Tapan and I already got drunk on our first date. Since I am nearing Indian jail time with all the desi dating rules I insist on violating, I better exercise some good chaste judgment, which leads me to the issue of chastity and the desi girl.

To me, this issue is SO insane on SO many fronts. I could understand if I was 18 that I should exercise safe sex or abstinence; there is no need to become the desi Bristol Palin and soil my parents’ good family name. But 15 years after college graduation, desi parents have to understand that sex is a biological need. I am sure desi parents have noticed that the population of India, excluding desi ex-pats, has topped 1 billion. With an international population like that, some desi somewhere is clearly not abstaining. I don’t understand how we desis can program a computer, take over the Silicon Valley, make up 20% of the doctors in America, yet not master birth control.

I’ll be honest, as a woman in my 30s the thought (sex) crosses my mind more than ever before. I am finally at a point in my life where I am comfortable with myself and my sexuality. I understand sex can have no emotional meaning if it is with someone I have no romantic interest in, like Shouldn’t Have Kissed Him  (Post 230). And that having sex with someone like Town and Country could blow my life apart, especially if he ignored me afterwards. But I was raised very conservatively and my parents made it clear good, chaste, and virtuous, God-fearing Indian girls don’t have sex with anyone other than their husband (I feel pretty certain they did not have the same talk with my brother).

And trust me on this, as a girl coming from the immigrant, and slightly backwards, and very gossipy desi community of Minneapolis-St. Paul, if I am going to dip my feet into dating from the familial pool, I better be damn sure I can swim the sharks. Indian dinner parties, with the round aunties clad in saris who now look like silky sausages adorned in gold, are dangerous waters for desi girls and their reputations to drown in --- should the aunties learn I had sex with Tapan, now or in the future.