Let’s be honest. In the Fiji-Indian community, marriage is not treated as a chapter of life. It is treated like a deadline.
A deadline that follows you from wedding halls to funerals, from family WhatsApp groups to Sunday lunches, from someone’s verandah in Lautoka to a car ride in Auckland.
Nobody says it softly either. They say it with that familiar mix of love, fear, frustration and community entitlement. “Abhi tak shaadi nahi hua?” Still not married? As if marriage is a bus I missed. As if I was sleeping at the platform while everyone else climbed on and became a proper adult.
My parents got married young. My dad was 21. My mum was 19. My brother got married at 25. By my age, my parents had both me and my brother. My brother and sister-in-law already had Aarav. Most of my immediate cousins are married. I am probably the last remaining cousin standing there like the forgotten plastic chair after a family function — still useful, still present, but clearly not where everyone expected me to be.
Just the other day, my mum told me in the car, almost like she was giving me a school instruction: Next year you finish your teaching in Japan, move back to Auckland and get married. She said she does not care what religion or country the girl belongs to anymore, as long as I get married. That is how exasperated she has become. Not “find love.” Not “be ready.” Just get married. Put a tick beside it. Close the file.
And I get it. I really do. In her mind, this is not cruelty. This is care. This is a mother looking at her son and worrying he will grow old alone. This is a woman raised in a world where marriage meant security, status, protection, routine and respectability. In our community, parents do not always know how to say, “I am scared for your future,” so they say, “Shaadi kar lo”.
Then come the long-distance aunties. The ones who suddenly remember your existence when someone’s niece, cousin, neighbour’s daughter, or former mandali friend becomes “available.” The phone rings. A name is mentioned. A biodata appears. Someone has a “good girl” in mind. Good family. Fair enough. Educated. Knows cooking. Works also. Religious, but modern. Modern, but not too modern. And before you even process the name, your life is being negotiated like a wedding hall booking.
And I keep saying no.
Not because I disrespect marriage. Not because I think I am above it. Not because I want to hurt my parents. But because, for the first time in my bloodline, I have the chance to live a life that was impossible for the people before me.
My girmitiya ancestors were not given the luxury of “finding themselves.” They were not sitting with passports, visas, international schools and job offers, wondering which country to move to next. They were shipped, numbered, disciplined, planted into cane fields and survival. Their world was not Tokyo, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, Beijing or Hanoi. Their world was plantation lines, debt, language loss, grief, mandali, roti, and making something out of humiliation. My grandparents and parents did not build their lives around personal fulfilment. They built them around duty. Around food on the table. Around school fees. Around not letting the family name fall. Around making sure their children did not have to beg, bend or break the way they did.
So when I travel the world and teach, when I stand in a classroom in Japan with a New Zealand passport and a Fiji birth certificate and a girmitiya surname, I do not see it as some selfish adventure. I see it as a miracle. A fragile one. A brittle one. Some days it feels like I am dreaming and one morning I will wake up back in reality, told to stop wandering and start behaving.
But is ambition selfish? Is seeing the world selfish? Is wanting to live on my own terms selfish? Or have we, as a community, become so used to sacrifice that freedom feels like betrayal?
This is where the age-shaming begins, wrapped in concern. At 32, I am already being told I am late. Old. Running out of time. I am told I will be too old to see my children grow up. But in New Zealand, 32 is not some social emergency. Stats NZ recorded the 2025 median age at marriage as 33.1 for men and 31.8 for women, so maybe I am not as late as the aunties think I am. Maybe I am just living in a different timeline from the one they were handed.
But try saying that in a Fiji-Indian household.
Try telling people that your readiness matters more than your age. Try explaining that the world has changed. Try saying that marriage should not happen just because everyone else is tired of waiting. You will still get the look. That look that says, “You are becoming too modern now.” That look that says overseas has changed you. That look that says education is good only until it starts giving you choices.
Because let’s be real. In our community, ambition is celebrated until it delays marriage. Study hard, beta. Become a teacher. Become a doctor. Become an engineer. Go overseas. Buy a house. Make us proud. But do not become so independent that you begin questioning the order of things. Do not become so comfortable in your own life that you forget the script. Do not become so ambitious that you start asking whether you even want the life everyone already planned for you.
And this is the question I keep returning to: what if I am not ready?
Right now, there are days I feel I can barely take proper care of myself. I am still learning discipline. Still learning health. Still learning money. Still learning how to come home after work and not feel emotionally drained. Still learning how to carry my own loneliness without panicking and calling it love. So what happens when another person’s hopes, wounds, moods, family and future become tied to mine?
Marriage is not a photo shoot. It is not a stage entrance with dholak and choreographed cousins. It is not the perfect sherwani, the perfect lengha, the perfect mandap and the perfect Instagram caption. It is someone’s life. It is someone’s daughter. Someone’s trust. Someone’s tomorrow.
Would it be responsible to marry because everyone else is tired of waiting?
That is the part our community does not sit with. We romanticise compromise, but sometimes what we call compromise is just two people slowly disappearing. We say “adjust kar lo” as if adjustment is a sacred medicine. Yes, every relationship needs patience. Every marriage needs humility. But what if it does not work? What if two good people are simply wrong for each other? What if the home becomes quiet in the worst way? What if love turns into duty, duty turns into irritation, irritation turns into resentment, and resentment becomes the air children breathe?
In our culture, divorce exists legally, obviously. But socially? In many Fiji-Indian families, divorce is still treated like a stain that refuses to wash out. We whisper it. We pity it. We investigate it. We blame the woman first, then the man, then the mother-in-law, then Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Facebook, bad friends, too much freedom, not enough religion. Anything except admitting that sometimes marriage fails because people were pushed into becoming husband and wife before they knew how to be honest human beings.
I am scared of that. I am scared of being trapped in a loveless cycle because leaving would shame too many people. I am scared of becoming bitter. I am scared of hurting someone because I married out of guilt instead of readiness. I am scared of waking up one day next to someone and realising I did not choose her freely. I chose her because the pressure became heavier than my honesty. And then there is Bollywood. Bollywood has ruined many of us, let us be honest. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge taught us that love should fight trains, fathers and mustard fields. Hum Saath-Saath Hain taught us that families can sing, forgive and reunite in matching outfits before the credits roll. Beautiful films, yes. But dangerous when you are a brown child learning love from cinema before you learn it from real conversations.
We grew up believing love would arrive with background music. That families would eventually agree. That sacrifice would be rewarded. That the right person would feel obvious. That a home would automatically become warm because the wedding was grand and the families were happy.
Real life is not a Sooraj Barjatya household. Real families sulk. Real couples misunderstand. Real in-laws interfere. Real people carry trauma, debt, diabetes, immigration stress, loneliness, body insecurity, ageing parents, career ambition and private sadness. Real love is not always cinematic. Sometimes it is two tired people deciding whether they still have enough softness left for each other.
When I was younger, my whole focus was study. Get educated. Get a better job. Leave. Survive. Make the family proud. Do the thing our elders begged us to do: become something. Now that I have built a life, everyone is asking why I have not built the next one. Wife. Children. Mortgage. Sunday groceries. School drop-offs.
And maybe I want those things one day. Maybe I do. But I want to arrive there honestly. Not dragged by guilt. Not cornered by aunties. Not emotionally blackmailed by the sentence, “Hum kab nana-nani banega?”
There are apps. There are matrimonial sites. There are introductions. But connection cannot be ordered like sweets for Diwali. You cannot filter a soul by caste, height, country, salary and “willing to relocate.” You can meet people that way, yes. But marriage needs more than eligibility. It needs readiness. It needs friendship. It needs courage. It needs two people who can tell the truth without performing for the whole community.
So when should I get married?
When I can choose someone without feeling I am surrendering my life. When I can love without resenting what I lost. When I can share responsibility without pretending I am more stable than I am. When I can honour my parents without sacrificing myself at the altar of their fear. When I meet someone whose presence feels like peace, not pressure.
Until then, I am not late. I am living.
And maybe that is what our community needs to learn. Not every unmarried person is selfish. Not every ambitious person is running away. Not every 32-year-old is broken, picky, cursed or immature. Some of us are simply trying to build a life our ancestors could not imagine, while still carrying the guilt of not becoming the child our parents expected.
That guilt is heavy. It sits in the chest. It follows you across airports. It whispers when you see your nephew growing up, when your mother sighs, when another cousin gets engaged, when another aunty says, “Bas ab tumhara number hai.”
Maybe my number will come.
But it should not come like a sentence. It should come like a choice.
ASHNEEL JAYNESH PRASAD is a Fiji-born New Zealand citizen working as a teacher in Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
