I was sipping my coffee at a bus stop in Lisbon when I struck up a conversation with a guy sitting next to me. He looked like a seasoned traveller, with a good work backpack, beaten-up sneakers, and a lonely planet guide stuff with post-it notes. When I introduced myself, he told me his name was Arjun, and he was from Chennai, India.
We got into talking about travel, as all backpackers do, places we have loved to explore, foods we have regretted eating and the minor indignities of budget hostels. But somewhere between the complaints about overpriced paella and stories of missed trains, Arjun told me something that stayed with me long after the bus arrived.
He said, “I just got married”. I congratulated him, assuming his wife was back home. “She’s here,” he said, smiling. “She’s in the hostel, packing. We’re on our honeymoon.” Now I was curious. “So you met while traveling?” “No,” he said, “we met through a caste-based matrimonial site. My parents set it up. It’s called mudaliyarkannalam.com.”
I blinked. That wasn’t a sentence I expected to hear on a public bench in Portugal.
He laughed at my expression; yeah, I know how it sounds, arranged marriages and all. But it worked out for us. Both our families are Mudaliyar, and that stuff still matters back home. I was curious, so I asked him if he believed in the caste, arranged marriage, family approval and sorts. He thought about it for a moment and went, “I never grew up dreaming of marrying someone from a dating app. This way, our families are happier, we found each other, we share the same values, and we had the time to understand each other. Its not as rigid as people think.”
Now, this surprised me a lot; he wasn’t defensive; he was just stating facts. He told me they’d chatted for months before meeting and that it wasn’t love at first sight, something steadier, built on long conversations and mutual respect. Their first trip together was a hike in the Western Ghats, and now they are wandering through Europe, arguing over museum tickets and laughing their way through bad translations.
This conversation stuck with me. We often fantasize about love as a spontaneous and rebellious act, especially in the West. But what I saw and heard today, this story of compatibility engineered through tradition, surprisingly enough, is working great.
I never saw Arjun and his wife again. But sometimes, when I hear the clink of backpack straps or catch a train full of young couples, I think about them and how even something as old-school as a caste-based matrimonial website somehow led two people to a shared life and a honeymoon in Lisbon.
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