The wave of nausea that overcame me right after this was too strong to resist, though I gathered up enough strength to lurch towards the bathroom. I began to throw up violently into the toilet. In between bouts, I became aware that the very concerned Vijay was standing behind me and trying to help me throw up. Weakly, I tried to push him out and shut the door behind him, but he insisted on holding me up over the toilet seat, running one hand over my hair to keep it out of the way. After I finally finished throwing up, I stumbled towards the washbasin and started cleaning up. When I looked up, I got a glimpse of both of us in the mirror. I took in my own appearance first – I looked completely washed out, with my face pale, hair matted and oily, and eyes red and watering. Repulsive was the word that I would have used to describe myself.
Then I caught sight of Vijay in the mirror. He was gazing at the back of my head, still stroking my hair affectionately and muttering in self-reproach, ‘Oh yaar … it’s my fault … I should have added some lemon juice to the ginger. That would have worked … come on, I’ll make you some nimbu pani, okay?’
It was then, at that exact moment, that I knew.
I drew in a deep breath and my words came out with the slow exhalation. ‘Okay … let’s do it.’
‘Okay?’ he said with the same undue enthusiasm. ‘Okay, you wait, I’ll get it …’
‘NOT the nimbu pani, you dumbo …’ I hissed. ‘Okay, as in … okay, let’s just get married.’
Just Married, Please Excuse
4
Meeting the Parents
‘Okay Mum … I’ll talk to you later then.’ I was about to hang up the phone when it occurred to me that perhaps now was as good a time as any. ‘Oh, hey Mum, I’m getting married and needed to ask you – what’s our caste again?’
‘What??’
A tad late, I realized that there could have been a better way to break the news, so I changed it to, ‘Ha ha! Surprise?’
Stony silence at the other end of the line. I knew this stony silence well. In fact, I had inherited the Great Art of this very stony silence from my own Mother Dear.
I said, ‘Ma, what I meant was that I was thinking of maybe getting married sometime and wanted to talk to you about it …’ I proceeded to pour my heart out about having met Vijay a few months ago and explained to her in great detail exactly what he was like.
The stony silence changed to cold hmmms and achhas over the course of the rather one-sided conversation, but by the time I had finished, I had apparently done a decent job because I got a positively lukewarm ‘Achha beta, at the end of the day, it is your decision.’ Her only concern was that he was so much older than me and that the family backgrounds sounded like they were rather different, considering they wanted to know about our caste.
‘They don’t want to know,’ I hastily corrected her. ‘As in, Vijay said since they don’t know anything about me, they might want to know. But he said it’s probably not relevant at all, but still, you never know. You know?’
I knew I wasn’t being very convincing. The truth was I wasn’t too convinced myself.
In fact, when he had tried to casually slip in the question about my caste, I had felt my hackles rise. I had told him in no uncertain terms that while I didn’t have the slightest clue about my caste, if there was going to be an eighteenth-century, caste-based discussion, then he could take his highborn brahmin ass and jump off the nearest conveniently located cliff. He had tried to explain to me in an earnest, fumbling manner that while it was of zero consequence to him, and probably of none to his parents, he just wanted to sound like he was completely prepared with all the answers. I wasn’t happy about it, but after much grumbling, had finally agreed to ask my mother.
In any case, just before we hung up, my mother agreed in a resigned manner that she would check with her own father and get back to me about our caste. I marvelled at this – clearly she and my late father hadn’t cared about caste when they had decided to marry, and neither had their families. How different my situation was, even though it was what, like, sixty years later or something? Ah, the things we do for love, I thought, feeling quite like a Hindi movie heroine. I realized with a start that I was not only going to be somebody’s wife, but somebody was perhaps even going to refer to me as ‘bahu’. Holy crap! Cow, cow, holy cow, I told myself reproachfully. Had to tone down the language.
It turned out that we were from the lineage of something called Suryavanshi Rajputs – now this sounded quite cool to me. I always knew I had a little bit of the warrior in me. I told Vijay this, adding a little bitingly that if his family had a problem with me, mine would wage war against his and beat them. He brightly said that this explained a lot and confessed that he had always privately likened me to the Jhansi ki Rani. In any case, he promised to keep my threat in mind.
The next step was for him to meet my mother, and he accordingly made a trip to Delhi about a week later. He was a little nervous but I wasn’t worried. I knew it would not be much of a challenge for him to win her over.
Mother Dear was a high-ranking government official – at that point, she was the Chief Comissioner of Delhi in Customs and Central Excise. To the outside world, she was a highly respected and impressive figure, bordering on the formidable. But to me and my two siblings – the elder, focused doctor-residing-in-England Abhimanyu and the younger, easygoing Gitanjali – she was just Good Ol’ Mama. Generally terribly wise and sensible and capable of just about everything, but with a remarkable tendency to exhibit rather daft behaviour at times. She actually had only two primary shortcomings – which we called in the politically correct corporate world ‘Areas of Improvement’ – the first being an inability to admit that she was wrong and the second being an inability to tell a coherent joke or story to save her life.
It turned out that I was right in my estimation that she would approve highly of Vijay. After his visit, I had a quick conversation with my sister Gitanjali, who reported that Vijay had quite floored our mother. Almost literally, because apparently he had caught her off guard and nearly tripped her up by making a dive for her feet as soon as he entered the house. In this regard, he was old-fashioned, as was the rest of his family. In any case, it was apparently his innate niceness and almost painful shyness that won our mother over.
Gitanjali said rather gleefully, ‘He kept laughing nervously and saying, “It’s a pleasure, aunty … eh-eh-heh” about everything. It was funny!’
I did not approve of this fun-making of my beau, even though she was doing a good job of imitating his embarrassed mumbling and it did sound as though it had been rather amusing. I snapped, ‘Stop laughing. He’s going to be your brother-in-law. What did you think of him?’
Her response was immediate and warm. ‘Oh, I thought he was very sweet!’ Honesty compelled her to add, ‘But a bit mad, of course.’
I narrowed my eyes at my cell phone and opened my mouth to refute. But I realized that I found it a fairly accurate assessment and decided to just let it go at that. Thanking my little squirt of a sister for her frank opinion, I hung up and sighed.
He had done it. However, I suspected that winning over his parents was not going to be so easy for me.
For one, they were from a different generation altogether – Vijay was not only already much older than me, but he also happened to be the youngest of the four children, the imaginatively named quartet Rama-Shyama-Ajay-Vijay. He was the baby of the family. The one they were all the fondest of and referred to by the nickname ‘Tunnu’, which of course I found eminently laughable and derived great pleasure in teasing him about.
‘But Ajay’s pet name is Pappi,’ he had pointed out vehemently.
I had doubled over in laughter all over again.
They were from Jaipur which, of course, was a very different kind of place from my hometown of Delhi. Also, they were strict vegetarian brahmins and had certain ideas about the kind of daughter-in-law they wanted. It was clear to me that these certain ideas were at odds with the person that I was. Vijay
assured me that they were wonderful people, but I could see he too had his doubts about how easily they would accept me.
I brooded on this issue for a while – so far the only members of his family that I had met were Ajay, Garima and his little nephew Praagya, nicknamed Pikki. Pikki was the son of Vijay’s eldest sister – the rather ominous sounding gynae-oncological surgeon, who I always thought of as Scary Dr Rama Didi. Little Pikki however was a chubby-cheeked little lad, whom I had first met two months ago when he had been sent to visit Vijay for a few days in Bangalore. During his stay, we had hung out a bit and he had heard me strumming on my guitar. Being a mere eight-year-old and therefore easily impressed, he was quite taken with me. In return, I thought of him as a particularly cute and intelligent child who exhibited an obvious good taste in people.
It later transpired that when Pikki went back home, the hot topic of discussion amongst the various concerned adults in the family was the screening of prospective brides for Vijay. Some nice shiny new brahmin girl from Jaipur was apparently one of the frontrunners, and young Pikki could not stop himself from piping up with a scornful challenge, ‘But can she play the guitar?’ This statement had the effect of mystifying his parents completely – and later, when we got to know about it, of amusing Vijay and doubling my admiration for young Pikki.
I now found myself feeling anxious as Vijay was travelling from Delhi to Jaipur to have the Talk with his parents. Just a couple of years before, Ajay and Garima had been married through the conventional arranged route, and Vijay’s parents were clearly expecting him to go the same way. Now that it was clear that we wanted to get hitched, he felt they needed to be primed accordingly, so that they would be happy about our decision.
I didn’t realize at the time that Vijay had chosen to arm himself with a couple of things he had sneakily taken from my files as a first step towards winning over his parents. One was an unusual picture of me at my recent convocation from management school, where I was dressed in a sari – one of the few occasions I had consented to wear what I considered a particularly painful and wretched garment. I was standing straight and tall, smiling brightly right at the camera, my shoulder-length dark brown hair shampooed and blow-dried, looking slim and elegant in the light blue sari that my visiting mother had helped me don. In other words, I looked nothing like my usual skinny, grungy and hunched-up self.
The other item that he took to show his father was the resumé that I had prepared for placement season at B-School. It had been suitably crafted to impress any prospective employer with my various wonderful professional qualities. Little did I know that he would cunningly swipe it to impress his father, a retired professor of physics, who Vijay knew would be pleased to see my impeccable academic qualifications from the best institutes in the country. When I found out about this later, I shook my head in disbelief – the whole set-up seemed completely alien to me, almost surreal.
During his all-important visit to Jaipur to break the news about me, Vijay did all the priming and question-fielding and truth-stretching required, smoothly assuring his parents and elder sisters that I would fit very well into the family and they would see that for themselves when they met me.
I had pounced on him for all the details once he returned from this trip, and had been listening with great interest to his account of his conversation with them when he reached this point. My voice came out in an unnaturally high-pitched squeak. ‘Meet them? Already?’
Two weeks later, I was a nervous wreck as we flew out from Bangalore to Jaipur for this fateful meeting. As luck would have it, the food on our Indian Airlines flight was so singularly stale that the non-vegetarian meal that I consumed to fortify myself caused me to develop an immediate and severe case of food poisoning. This was the second instance in the last few weeks that my stomach had failed me, the bitter irony of it being that prior to meeting Vijay, this had never happened to me. Most of the next few hours passed by in a blur, but I was aware of a few things – high fever and giddiness; the concerned look on Vijay’s face; the memory of how he had acted when I had fallen ill earlier, and consequently a vague sort of worry at the back of my mind that the ghost of Florence Nightingale might re-enter his body and he would start to feed me his special, vomit-inducing combination of Horlicks, papaya and grated ginger.
He somehow managed to get me into a taxi when we landed at Jaipur, and on the way to his parents’ home, I kept deliriously repeating in a conversational tone, ‘Honey, you know what? Your family is going to absolutely hate me!’ For some reason, this thought struck me as pretty funny and I added, ‘Wheee! Ha ha!’
‘No, no, of course they won’t,’ Vijay assured me a few times, his voice uncertain.
As our taxi wove its way towards his home, he said, ‘Er, you remember what we discussed about speaking only in Hindi to Mummyji, right?’
‘Of course,’ I retorted dizzily. ‘I can do Hindi. Hindi is my mother’s tongue.’ Then a feeling of sudden panic hit me and I demanded, ‘Quick! How do you say namaste in Hindi?’
Vijay said something in response, but at this point, I fell asleep against his shoulder.
I woke up just as we reached their house, a nice little one-storeyed grey structure in an old colony of Jaipur, situated opposite a well-maintained park. I had, as a concession to the big occasion, worn a salwar-kameez. I was completely overwhelmed. There were many people milling around; I had never done this sort of thing before; I had no idea what to expect and felt like my every move was being watched and judged. On top of this, the fever seemed to be peaking and I was dimly aware of the fact that I wasn’t thinking or speaking very clearly.
It was a crowded house because Vijay’s sisters and Ajay, along with their respective spouses, had also landed up to grace the occasion. Vijay had told me that they always greeted each other with the younger people touching the feet of the older lot, and I was the youngest person around for miles. This meant that, as soon as I walked in, there were many pairs of feet for me to bend over and touch respectfully. This was also something I had never done before and had only seen in movies, but I just followed Vijay’s lead and once I got into the flow, it felt nice and theatrical. ‘Pau laagu Maaji!’ I thought, as I touched my prospective mother-in-law’s feet. ‘Pau laagu Bauji,’ I murmured as I touched Papaji’s feet. In a fit of enthusiasm, I found myself bending over to grab the feet of everybody in sight, being stopped by Vijay just in the nick of time from also embracing those of Murugan, the old family servant, who stood looking on curiously, somewhere at the periphery of all the mayhem.
After this, I smiled beatifically at everybody around me throughout the remainder of the visit and answered all the questions directed at me. I remembered and followed Vijay’s advice that one of the keys to Mummyji’s heart would be to converse with her in Hindi. She was a small lady, and she sat next to me on the sofa, observing me keenly with unexpectedly striking grey eyes through her spectacles. All her children were above average height, clearly having taken after Papaji in this regard. Just to make some conversation, I was about to remark on how amazing it was that four such tall, strapping adults could have been produced by such a tiny being as her, but thought the better of it. Or more accurately, by the time I finished doing an acceptable translation of the thought in my head into Hindi without sounding hopelessly vulgar, I had forgotten all about it.
Now, Mummyji was saying something to me which I had missed. I concentrated hard and realized she had just asked me whether my elder brother was already married. I was dazed, but I knew the answer to this one. Giving her what I hoped was a winning smile, I informed her in no uncertain terms, ‘Yes. Aur Bhabhiji bhi bahut acchi hain – bilkul meri tarah!’ There was a moment of silence and then the whole room burst into laughter, while I looked around and blinked at everybody in a confused but good-natured way.
Vijay had informed them that I was very ill and therefore not my usual dazzling self. Either way, despite the fever – or perhaps because of it – his family accepted our decision to m
arry. A month later, my mother came over with me and Vijay to Jaipur for a visit to meet them, and a date towards late February was fixed.
My mother had been a tad indignant when, towards the end of her visit, Papaji voiced his request that there be no alcohol and non-vegetarian food at our wedding. ‘What do they think, we are some kind of barbarians or something? Of course there will be no alcohol and non-veg food at the wedding,’ she said when we were back in Delhi. I couldn’t quite muster up the courage to point out that this conversation was happening over the carcass of a delicious but unfortunate chicken and a glass of wine. I was always up for a good debate, but not with my mother, who was a worse loser of arguments than even I was.
In any case, I was just happy and relieved that both sides had been successfully convinced to approve of our impending marriage. Also, one of my newfound principles in life: You don’t argue with your mother, especially when she is generously springing the cash for your wedding. At least, not until after the wedding.
5
Marrying a Sharma
The wedding was a fairly low-key affair at the Radisson hotel in Delhi. It would perhaps have been a little higher-key if all of my friends had shown up, but unfortunately, a lot of them were scattered across the country and worldwide, and apparently the notice that I gave them – ranging from about two weeks to five days before the wedding, depending on who I remembered when – was not good enough for many of them to make the trip. Instead, they sent their love and best wishes for the both of us with a few choice abuses just for me. The argument I used in my defense, that I had never been married before and it was all very new to me, did not cut much ice with them.
As always, blood proved to be thicker than friends and most of my family, also scattered all over the world, did make it for the ceremonies – perhaps also due to the fact that my mother had handled their invitations and had apparently informed them about a month in advance. So my favourite cousin Mini had flown in from Australia and was flashing her dimpled smiles all over the place; and my brother Abhimanyu and his wife Vandna had also landed up, all the way from England.
JUST MARRIED, PLEASE EXCUSE Page 3