Rishta in Jaranwala

Reading a Jaranwala profile properly

Textile is five jobs and two kinds of asset

The Khurrianwala side of this tehsil is power-loom and processing country, and the word textile on a profile from here is close to useless on its own. At least five positions hide behind it. There is the man who owns looms — and the only two numbers that describe him are how many looms and whether the shed is his own or rented, because a shed on rent with six looms in it is a working man with an overdraft, not a factory owner. There is the weaver who runs two or four looms that belong to somebody else, paid by the thaan rather than by the month, usually on a twelve hour shift, sometimes nights. There is the preparation side — sizing, warping, beam setting — which is skilled and steadier. There is the processing side, the dyeing, printing, stitching and packing units, where the job titles are more formal but the work is shift work. And there is the trade: a yarn or grey-cloth dealer who may sit in Faisalabad’s Sutar Mandi all week and keep his family here.

So ask it in a form that cannot be answered in one word. Own work or job work. How many looms, owned or rented, in your own shed or in a shared one. Paid monthly or by the thaan. Which shift, and how many days in the week. Supplying the local market, a Faisalabad exporter, or both. And then ask the question that tells you most about security: is there an appointment letter, is there an EOBI or social security card, is the unit registered. A great deal of work in this belt is informal, and that is not a shameful answer — it is simply a fact that changes what happens to a family when the man is ill for two months. A household that answers it openly is telling you the truth about everything else.

Self-cultivated, theka, or batai

Acres are the other word that hides four lives. In this tehsil a family holding land is doing one of three things with it, and they are not remotely the same proposal.

If the land is self-cultivated, the family farms it: there is a tractor or there is money paid to somebody who has one, there are hands needed at wheat harvest and rice transplanting, the income is lumpy and arrives at harvest, and somebody in the household gets up at four in the morning for a good part of the year. If it is given on theka — a cash lease, usually a year or three at a time — the family has a fixed rent coming in and does no farming at all, which very often means the boy has a town job or a shop and the word zamindar on the profile describes an asset rather than an occupation. If it is on batai, a crop share with the tenant, the family takes the risk of the season along with the tenant and the income swings with it.

Each one implies a different household, so ask which, and then ask the two follow-ups. How many acres and in whose name — because in a joint family the figure quoted is usually the grandfather’s undivided holding and the boy’s own share is a fraction of it, to be settled one day among brothers, which is entirely normal and simply a different fact from the one most people hear. And is the land canal-irrigated with a working watercourse, or on a tubewell with the bill attached. None of this is prying. In a canal-colony tehsil it is the conversation the elders would have had anyway, three days later and less precisely.

Forty minutes from Faisalabad, and whose job the travelling is

Jaranwala sits close enough to Faisalabad that a great deal of this tehsil’s life happens there and sleeps here. Men go in to the mandi, the mills, the offices and the hospitals; students go in to the colleges, the university and the medical and engineering institutes; and the vans and wagons that carry them leave before dawn and come back after dark. That single fact creates the most commonly skipped question in a Jaranwala rishta, and it is almost always a question about a woman.

If the girl is studying in Faisalabad, or teaching, or working in a bank, a hospital or an office there, and both families expect that to continue after the wedding, then somebody has to answer three things before the engagement, not after. Who arranges the travel — a family car, a college van, a wagon, a relative. Who pays for it. And is the in-laws’ house on a route that makes it possible at all, because a house out in a chak off the Satiana road and a house on Khurrianwala Road are forty minutes and a world apart for a woman who has to be somewhere at eight in the morning. Say the answer out loud and, better, write it into the partner preferences. More marriages in this tehsil quietly end a young woman’s education or job over the travelling than over anybody actually objecting to it.

The same fact has a second consequence worth naming. A boy who works in Faisalabad but comes home every night is still living in his family’s house, and in most cases the bride will join that household rather than a separate one. That is not a drawback — for many families it is the point — but a girl expecting a home of her own in the city and a family expecting a daughter-in-law in the joint house are both being reasonable and are not talking about the same marriage. Settle it in words. Ask where the couple would live for the first year, and who else lives in that house.

Jaranwala is a tehsil of Faisalabad, so write it both ways

Every document in the house — the CNIC, the domicile, the matric certificate — says Faisalabad, because Jaranwala is a tehsil and not a district. This has a direct effect on searching. A good share of the members who actually live in Jaranwala, Khurrianwala, Satiana and the chaks have registered themselves as Faisalabad, which is what their papers say and what their college and their employer say. If you set the city filter to Jaranwala alone and conclude the pool is thin, you have not seen most of them.

So do two things. When you write your own profile, put the town and the district in the same line — Jaranwala, Faisalabad, or Khurrianwala, Jaranwala, Faisalabad — and add the chak number if you are in a village, because that is how a local family will recognise where you are and who your neighbours are. When you search, run Jaranwala, then run Faisalabad and read the area line before you discard anybody, then widen to Nankana Sahib, Sheikhupura and Gojra, whose boundary chaks have always married across into this tehsil. Toba Tek Singh, Chiniot and Okara are worth a look after that.

Use the preferences field as if it were the whole conversation

The written partner preferences are the most under-used field on this site, and in a tehsil like this one they can save a family three meetings. Nobody is embarrassed by a clear preference; people are embarrassed by discovering one late. Four lines will do it.

Say your biradari rule in your own words, including whether you will consider outside it, because in these chaks some families keep marriages close within the biradari and others deliberately do not, and the biradari field alone will not tell a reader which you are. Say what you want from the work: a man with his own looms or land, a salaried job with an appointment letter, government service, or that you do not mind which as long as it is steady. Say what you expect about study and work after marriage, for a daughter and for a daughter-in-law, and say who you think should arrange the travelling. And say where you expect the couple to live — joint household, separate portion of the same house, or a home of their own in town. Those four lines are the actual rishta. Everything else on the profile is the introduction to them.