DigiVoyager

It is Ramazan, and a pleasant one at that with good weather so one doesn't really get too exhausted while fasting.

I am not really in the mood to write something proper so this is just me babbling about matchmaking culture.

When growing up in Pakistan, you're told life starts when you finish your degree and get your first job.

As a doctor with over 3 years experience, I am now being told life starts when you finish your training and get a big post, then you're able to buy a car, a house, etcetera and are considered eligible.

By the time that happens for me most of my peers will have children aged 9 and what not, they will probably have enough savings to get a 2nd house or probably just be out of this hellhole. It feels a bit like trying to race a bicycle or perhaps even a donkey cart versus some cars.

In Pakistan, those who don't get married past a certain age are generally viewed as leftovers – yes, it is that toxic.

For women that age is lower, and thus life even harsher. Past 25, people start wondering if there are serious issues with the girl, after all if she's unmarried at 25, something must be seriously wrong with her. And 30? Well that's the red line. After all, there can only ever be one reason a girl is unmarried, it means nobody wanted her.

Mhm, people here are that stupid and toxic.

For men you used to get a bit more leeway, as it's a patriarchal society and men were expected to take time to settle, but that has also faded away as of late. With so many rishta bureaus, Facebook groups dedicated to matchmaking and apps for the same, there's no shortage of men and thus, it is no longer a case of “oh men need time to settle.” because so many men have houses from their parents, familial wealth, automobiles etc. I am already mocked for it at 26 by people I work with, friends etc. and there is another senior we have, aged 31 or perhaps 32, who I have heard being referred to as patay maal by the nurses, other doctors etc.

Patay maal means leftovers, maal being thing/item/asset and patay meaning ignored/left behind.

Now the fellow says it started at 30. For me who is getting it at 26, I wonder how bad it'll be. I mean, I already have some idea, I am the kind of person who if he visits his relatives won't get offered a glass of water, whereas others might get forced to stay for dinner, but I'd rather not have fake niceties in my life.

For all my poor, not so well off friends, the matchmaking system is brutally transactional in nature, and will make you feel utterly worthless unless you have some decent assets. People would rather have an uneducated landlord with a good passive income than a struggling banker, doctor, engineer, lawyer etc. I do understand, to a certain extent – you would, at the very least, want to make sure your daughter was financially secure if you lived in the capitalistic hellscape of Pakistan; a dystopia so hellish for the common man that it would make Orwell throw away his finished manuscript and begin to write it all over again.

A lot of my aunts tell me I brought this on myself, and should have become a freelancer or something of the sort and studied something that paid better instead. There is no sympathy no matter where you go. And if you complain about the saturation and lack of pay, “Doctor so and so” aged 50 with a decades old private practice is mentioned. Reason, as they say, goes out the window, for a swim with some starving sharks, while wearing a blood soaked shirt.

They said I should just shut up and marry someone over 40, just because of her wealth. Maybe in a different world, I would have done, but I have spent so long swimming in the waters of poverty that I no longer care about much, if anything. Give me a good book or a film and I am set, I have even lost interest in two of the things I loved the most, anime and games, no longer do I care for either, perhaps I am too depressed, who knows.....

I do, in fact, and it is depression after all, wearing an orange hoodie with the words eat, pray and love written in bold while he mixes ice cream with coca cola and makes a float.

Just as men suffer rejection based on physical traits – for instance, age, baldness, height, wrong skin color are the main dealbreakers for many – so too do women, and of a far worse degree. In addition to height, color (girls with wheatish and dark skin are often told to get certain dodgy injections for whitening, fairness creams are the norm – think of the famous Fair and Lovely), their face gets scrutinized – someone I know got plastic surgery because her big nose was a deal-breaker for her cousin, so do their manners, their “keeping in line with tradition”, dressing, how they talk, obedience and what not. There are also those weird types obsessed with finding a doctor daughter in law, only to turn her into a homemaker, it is considered a societal flex. Yes, things are that bad.

To be honest, I am just a bitter man paying for having grown up a little too sheltered, I had no idea medicine was so saturated or that my life after becoming a doctor would be no different than the struggles of a common clerk, but that is the state of Pakistan, turn over a rock and you find 100s of us, or even 1000s, there are more medical colleges than ever, and the rate at which new hospitals emerge with new posts isn't even 1:10 for the amount of new doctors that graduate every year. The teaching side isn't much better either.

Women have it far worse, being treated like cattle or livestock at a market, imagine just resting at home, reading a book when you are told to come down to the lounge and meet this family who wants to look at you. It is all so Orwellian, and the normalization/embedding level of this culture is too horrid. And for those over 30, it is a particularly horrendous nightmare, as then you're shown men of 40, 50 and even 60 or often widowers and divorcees. Lucky are they who come from more liberal families and don't have to go through this system – though even there some families often force their daughters to end things and marry that one boy they picked out, instead. What follows will be a cleansing (or in more extreme cases, deletion) of all her online accounts, perhaps with Ariana Grande's Thank U, Next playing in her room as she does – my shout outs to that one colleague who has imparted more pop culture knowledge to me during our breaks than an entire college level course would in years, sometimes I feel like we are hanging out in America when she's talking.

I've always wanted siblings but I'm glad I don't have a sister, I would not be able to stand her going through this system.

My own fate, you can say I kind of foresaw this, even as a kid, was always clear. When you swim in the waters of poverty too long you start to accept that maybe this is all you'll get, but there is also a sense of gratefulness, having a roof over your head and edible food, and the respect I get from some patients and all our custodial staff.

And so, my once great expectations have turned into grape ones. Life goes on, it throws a newspaper at someone's window, drives over a ditch, slips on a banana peel, nearly gets eaten by a tiger, and smokes a cigarette with death, who is waiting for his friends at the bus stop. Turtles move a lot faster than we realize, and often life drives over them too.