<

p>On this unholiest of days, I thought I’d share 2.0 passages about coupling from 1.5-gen books. Lavanya Sankaran takes joy in the idea that dilly-dallying men deserve what they get in The Red Carpet:

And certainly, a convent-educated accent was an asset… This involved, primarily, keeping our knees together… Innocent of the depredations of Man (or Boy), at least until their parental duty was done. Delivered, one girl, unsullied, to the marital bed. Her price far above rubies…

For a decade, it seemed, [the bachelors] had been festooned with women, all sorts, from the cute, the silly, the please-domesticate-mes, to the independent, the fiery, the I’ll-sleep-with-but-won’t-love-yous, and further beyond, to the Plainly Bizarre. And they had frolicked and gamboled with happy abandon, and no awareness of the fate that quietly awaited them…

All those women, those sillys, those feistys, those Saturday-night mainstays, had simply vanished. All of them. Together. Birdlike, in a great migratory movement… these chicks had flown. They had married, dispersed, dehydrated. [Link]

In Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid’s East Village/Karachi romance ends more happily:

I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one had wanted to believe he was the first so badly)…

The scene is the East Village, a little before midnight, on the steps of a fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue A. The date is important… Halloween… So there I am, trudging up the steps… when I see this cute desi guy in a white shirt and black trousers, looking ridiculously out of place but very comfortable at the same time… He catches my eye as I pass and says “Hi,” but I ignore him, because the last thing I want to deal with tonight is some conservative boy from the homeland with nothing to say…

But at some point (you saw this coming) I find myself on the fire escape with the brown boy I’d seen before. We’re dancing, just the two of us, and his name is Ozi and he’s wickedly sexy, and what the hell, we spend the night together…

He proposed during a snowstorm in March, looking cold as only a Pakistani man in America can… Before I knew it, I was showing him off at South Asian Student Association parties, enjoying the horrified jealousy on the faces of my prim and proper colleagues. Yes, Mumtaz, that slut, had bagged herself a prince, which meant there was one less out there for them…

The summer after we graduated… we were married in Karachi by the sea. [Link]