Surat, Gujarat (West India), 40+ Degrees and Mercury Rising

On the night of Tuesday, 12 May 2009, one of my informants, Rohit, got married to his girlfriend from Mumbai who he had met in Melbourne in 2005. They had fallen in love while living in the same student house in Melbourne and studying at the same university. They were now both proud PR holders, and Rohit's wife was even planning to apply for Australian citizenship soon. Watching Rohit wait for the priest to finish a particular ritual, I joked that he was in fact marrying an Australian girl. It amused Rohit, though earlier that evening he had already mentioned that they had no intention of settling in Australia. As a newly married and soon to be Indian-Australian couple, they would move in with his parents and find jobs in Delhi. The struggle for Australian permanent residency had been a stressful one, and their friends talked about little else. They had all come from various parts of India to Australia as international students and almost all had ended up getting a permanent residency as well. One of Rohit's friends had recently married her boyfriend from Melbourne. She was now living with his family in Mumbai while he was setting up his mining business in Australia, though soon she would join him there. They had all attended a wedding of another friend from Melbourne in Delhi a couple of months earlier, and less than a month from now they would all be heading for Tamil Nadu in the South of India for a similar wedding.