We kept quiet about it in conversations with the family. However, now that we had rejoined work at the office, I discovered that for reasons best known to himself, Vijay seemed to have spread the story far and wide amongst our colleagues. So whenever someone congratulated me on the wedding, they also added in hushed tones a few words of consolation about the loss of all my wedding jewellery. I was constantly trying to forget about it but every time someone brought it up, I had no choice but to put on a sad face that mirrored their expressions and agree with them while they tutted about what the world was coming to when a young bride lost all her wedding jewellery so soon after the wedding.
After a few days of this drama, I finally decided to break the news to my mother on the phone, hurriedly adding that it was only very expensive jewellery after all and she should therefore not take it to heart.
‘Oh, I won’t take it to heart,’ she promised, but being the perceptive sort, I detected a note of sarcasm in her voice.
She went on to sternly inform me that the jewellery pieces were missing simply because they had been left behind by me in her house in Delhi, and she had been waiting for me to bring it up when I finally noticed.
I was both relieved and stung by this revelation. I said that my leaving the jewellery behind was a little inadvertent slip. She said it was carelessness of the highest order and asked me if I even knew which of the pieces were missing.
Hurt to the quick by this, I retorted that while I didn’t have the slightest clue about the actual pieces missing, I was well aware that the sheer volume had been reduced by about sixty per cent.
She said tartly that jewellery was not usually measured by ‘sheer volume’ and suggested that perhaps it would be a good idea for her to put it all in a locker in Delhi. I saw the sense in this and agreed.
‘So, what do you think we should buy first for the flat?’
It was the first Sunday after we got back and we were contemplating finally doing up the place a bit. We were staying at the same flat that Vijay had been living in earlier, in a posh complex on Airport Road. Ajay and Garima had moved to the US a few months earlier. I really missed having them around at home and also wondered who would talk sense into Vijay about every fight we had being his fault.
The flat was a nice and airy one, with two large bedrooms, a fair-sized kitchen and a lovely sunny balcony. I turned in a slow circle, taking in the bare drawing room. I thought about it and suggested, ‘Well, most people have curtains. Maybe we should start with those.’
Despite months of Garima’s presence and civilizing influence, Vijay hadn’t bothered to get a single curtain for the apartment so far. This contributed to the feeling of openness and let in plenty of air and sun, but I soon convinced him that a few curtains would be a good idea. I cleverly included the fact that with curtains in place, he wouldn’t have to look at the monkeys that swung on the trees right outside the balcony and occasionally peeped into the house. He shuddered and agreed.
Vijay went in for a bath, and while he was in there, I thought it would be a good idea to surprise him with his favourite breakfast of alu-parathas. How wifely of me. I felt a strange sort of satisfaction and went into the kitchen to look around for the ingredients.
During a short visit to Jaipur just before the wedding, I had carefully observed how his mother made the alu-parathas for him, stuffing them lovingly with alu-masala consisting of surprising amounts of lal-mirchi and dhania. I had memorized the methodology pretty well – but now, I just couldn’t find what I needed.
When Vijay came out of his bath, he found me standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking desolate. ‘What happened? You need something?’
‘Honey,’ I was petulant because my surprise was being spoilt, ‘I thought I’d make you some nice alu-parathas. But you don’t have any atta in the house!’
‘Of course there is atta – did you look in this cupboard over here?’ He opened the cupboard I was standing in front of and pulled out a large blue packet. ‘See? Right here, a new packet.’
‘This?’ I was genuinely surprised ‘What are you talking about? This is not type of the atta I mean. Where is the sticky stuff we make rotis with?’
There was a moment of silence. Vijay put his arm around me gently. ‘I know you haven’t cooked before. But please tell me you know that atta doesn’t come readymade in the form you use for rotis?’
I felt my face getting hot. Of course I knew that – somewhat vaguely. It was just that I wasn’t used to this whole kitchen gig and had merely blanked out for a minute there.
Still, it wouldn’t do to have my husband think of me as a total idiot. So I forced myself to laugh. ‘Ha ha! Don’t be silly. Who wouldn’t know that?’
This incident would make me the butt of many jokes later, but its more immediate effect over the next few days was that Vijay took it upon himself to try and teach me how to cook. I wasn’t an enthusiastic student, but soon I was able to make tea, alu-parathas and artistically misshapen rotis, of which – just like snowflakes – no two were ever alike.
Dal continued to be a challenge, however. It would always end up spilling out of the pressure cooker, possibly because I always ended up putting in the wrong amount of water.
‘I told you – you’re supposed to put in three times as much water as the dal,’ Vijay said, leaning against the kitchen doorway one morning, as I stood with a frown of concentration in front of the open pressure cooker. ‘How much dal have you just put in?’
‘Two fistfuls.’
He looked at me for a moment and then said, ‘Okay fine – so just put in six fistfuls of water now.’ As he walked away, I could hear him muttering, ‘Beyond a point, I can’t help …’
8
Going Shopping
Over the next few weeks, life became extremely busy. At work, I had just been assigned to manage one of the ‘most important Premium Dust Tea brands in South India’, which was a hugely profitable cash cow for the company but which, being a North Indian from ‘Dahli’, I had never actually heard of until I was informed that I was now the brand manager for it. Vijay had rejoined in his earlier capacity as marketing manager in the foods category, and was back to sardonically interviewing embarrassed housewives in order to dream up ways to get them to stuff their kids more with items like jam and squash – items which he himself never touched.
We used every spare moment on the weekends to do the shopping in order to set up our home. We had first gone out to buy curtains. As expected, our tastes were fairly different, but we figured it was okay because curtains had to be purchased for all the rooms in the house. We went around happily indulging in our individual tastes – I bought light flowing pinks and oranges and he went for heavier, more staid greys and blues. It was only later, when we actually got around to putting them up, that we realized that the various sizes we had bought for different windows now resulted in each room in our house having to be adorned in a combination of our clashing tastes, resulting in an interesting overall effect. The drawing room was now done up in mera waala light pink and his grey-and-blue. I decided I quite liked it.
‘We should buy blue sofas, I think,’ I announced after stepping back and running a critical eye over the room.
Vijay joined me in running the critical eye over our clashing curtains and to my surprise, he agreed, ‘Haan, you’re right. That will bring it all together very nicely. Bright blue, right?’
The thought occurred to me that possibly, most people bought sofa sets and other furniture first and then decided on matching curtains – but I brushed it aside as being such a common approach. ‘Bright blue,’ I affirmed.
When I had talked to Vijay earlier about our need for sofas, stating my personal belief in having some sort of seating arrangement apart from mattresses and beanbags, he had readily agreed. However, one of the criteria he was adamant about was that it should not ‘sweat’ – by which he meant that since he planned to sleep on it while I was travelling, it should be of a material that would not make h
im hot and sweaty during the night. So we agreed that we were on the lookout for bright-blue, non-sweating sofas.
These turned out to be harder to come by than you might think.
Over the next few days, I suggested that we relax the colour criteria since sofas appeared to be available in most colours other than blue. But apparently Vijay had boundless energy when it came to ‘studying the options’ while shopping, and so we continued to systematically explore what felt like every furniture shop in the city of Bangalore.
To my increasing chagrin, I was discovering the incompatibility in our shopping styles, which applied to every item that we considered buying. While I usually wanted to grab the first reasonable facsimile of whatever we had in mind and get out of the shop as fast as I could, Vijay wanted to research everything. He had an obsession with having ‘options’ and for every single item on our list, he would not rest until he had examined and evaluated at least four alternatives. This habit was frustrating, especially since we would invariably end up buying the very item that I had pointed out in the first place.
Vijay’s thoroughness as a shopper was also proving detrimental to various unfortunate salespersons that we encountered on the way. At one store, I pointed out a nice dark sofa made of some leather-like material. A glib salesguy swooped down on us and said, ‘Ah yes, sir, ma’am. This is a great piece.’
Vijay leaned towards the sofa, leaned away from it, bent to the side to examine it and said, ‘Hmmm. But does it sweat?’
The salesguy said, ‘I’m sorry, sir? Sweat?’
Vijay explained, ‘You know, sweat? As in, if I’m going to sleep on it all night, will it get all sweaty for me?’
The salesguy pretended to get it, and started nodding wisely. ‘Oh, that. Of course not, sir. It will not sweat at all.’
Vijay said ‘hmmm’ in a non-committal way. He then surreptitiously put his hand on the sofa and kept it there, while proceeding to ask the salesguy a series of questions about the exact nature of the material, where it was made, what the price was, the logistics, sourcing and human resource strategy of the company that made it and so on.
After a few minutes of this, just when the glib salesman thought he had sealed the deal, Vijay suddenly withdrew his hand and thrust it towards the salesman’s face accusingly, saying ‘You said it would not sweat. But I kept my hand on it for the last five minutes and it’s sweating. See?’
The salesguy recoiled at Vijay’s sweaty hand. He was rendered speechless, and his gaze moved between Vijay’s palm and the imprint it had left behind on the expensive sofa. We left very shortly afterwards, my cheeks red.
Thankfully, the sofa ordeal eventually ended when we lucked out with a new shipment at Gautier – a sofa set that was not only bright blue, but as soft as you might expect the clouds to be. Once you sank into the sofa, it was difficult to escape and Vijay and I would later spend many pleasant Sunday afternoons entangled upon the three-seater, arguing about which channel to watch, flipping constantly between his news channels, my music channels and inevitably settling on reruns of Friends.
But in the meantime, our other furniture purchase attempts also showed the same pattern of strange shopper behaviour on Vijay’s part. When it was time to buy a dining table, we found a shop which had a big sale on. Vijay saw one small dining table and chair set that caught his fancy, and asked the salesperson how much discount he could get.
The salesperson beamed happily at him and said, ‘Sir, this is a great offer. It’s actually seventy per cent off.’
Vijay was impressed. ‘Seventy per cent, eh?’
The salesperson mistook the question in his voice to be doubt and admitted, ‘Well, two of these chairs are just a little chipped near the base – but otherwise, they’re in great condition.’
Vijay was inspecting the dining table closely, when suddenly a thought occurred to him. He turned to the salesguy and said accusingly ‘Your signs outside say fifty per cent discount.’
The salesguy said, ‘Yes, sir …?’
‘But you said this has seventy per cent discount?’
‘Err … yes …’
Vijay looked at him keenly and said, ‘So why does the sign outside not say upto seventy per cent discount?’
The salesguy spluttered. ‘Well, yes, sir … you see … there’s only this one piece with seventy per cent … so, once it’s gone, people will ask why you’ve put upto seventy per cent … so that’s why, sir …’
Vijay seemed satisfied with this explanation and said, ‘Hmm. Achha ji. Theek hain ji.’ I stood there tapping my feet, wondering what this exchange had to do with anything and why Vijay was making the man feel guilty about a great offer.
This is how I discovered that Vijay had a penchant for irrelevant conversations with strangers, even telecallers. Most people would get annoyed by unsolicited offers, but Vijay saw them as an opportunity to interact with and irritate people. So when someone called with an offer for a credit card, he would grill them for about ten minutes on its costs and benefits before incorrectly informing them that he was a student with no money and no job prospects. They would usually hang up on him and he would then chuckle to himself with quiet satisfaction.
He was even happy when it was a wrong number. I heard him answer one such call with a loud, enthusiastic, ‘Oh haanji, haan … You want to speak to Mukesss? … Mukesss not here right now … I’m his brother Suressss … But you give me message, I will give to Mukesss … Mukesss to call you back on this number? … Yess, yess, I will tell him … Anything else, ji? … No ji? … ok ji … Bye bye, ji.’ He hung up with an immensely pleased look on his face. When he caught sight of my disapproving face as I stood at the bedroom door, the smile immediately dropped off his face, and he explained seriously, ‘Wrong number. Tchah! So irritating.’
During our next shopping excursion, we were attempting to buy a suitcase for my regular work travel. We went to Shopper’s Stop and there was an enthusiastic trainee salesboy who was insistent on selling me the suede version of a suitcase that I liked. He told me, ‘This colour very good, madam. Suede matrial bahut hi achha rehta hain.’ I remarked that this particular light brown colour looked like it would get dirty very soon, so I would prefer the black version. The young man persisted, saying that this color was the most popular. He said he had sold twenty-five pieces already. He then said the wonderful thing about the suede material was that the dirtier it got, the better it looked. He repeated this logic over and over: ‘Madam, I’m telling you … Jitna ganda hota hain, aur bhi achha lagta hain,’ until Vijay lost his patience and questioned him with exaggerated politeness as to why, if this were true, didn’t he just make them even dirtier before selling them.
The young trainee had nothing to say in response, and looked quite deflated. Out of pity for him, I bought the suitcase, giving my husband a dirty look. The young trainee arranged the billing for us, but he went about it in a rather morose and listless way, and it was clear that he was re-evaluating his career options. I didn’t blame him.
When it came to blame, I had decided it was always going to be Vijay.
9
Opposites Attack
‘So you don’t believe in God? At all?’ Vijay asked me, the incredulity clear in his voice.
Actually living together as a married couple was proving that my pre-nuptial apprehensions about our differences had not been unfounded. In fact, we clearly had more differences than we had imagined.
We had just finished a late dinner, and I stretched and yawned before I got up to clear the table.
‘Not really,’ I said, as I picked up his plate, put it on top of mine and strode towards the kitchen to put the cutlery in a haphazard pile in the sink. I called over my shoulder, ‘Also, I’m not really big on pujas and all that.’
There was a moment of silence, after which he joined me in the kitchen with the rest of the dirty dishes. After carefully balancing his set of dishes on the ones I had dumped in the sink, he turned to me and said, ‘I kind of like pujas. And
we’re going to be having a puja every Diwali in Jaipur – you will fold your hands and sing along, right?’
‘I suppose I will,’ I said. No point in being a rebel without a cause. Then I realized something. ‘Wait a minute – we’ll have to spend every Diwali in Jaipur? Every single year? Never in Delhi with my family?’
‘Er, well, yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a family tradition – we all gather there, all of us – it’s like we’re a joint family for a few days! It’s great fun.’
‘Vijay, I don’t think the idea of a joint family is great fun. I like my space.’
‘Yes, but it’s just for a few days … and you’ll like it – you’ll see how bright and colourful Jaipur gets at Diwali, you’ll wear nice saris all the time, you’ll …’
I almost squeaked in disbelief. ‘I’ll have to wear saris all the time? You know I hate wearing saris.’
‘Er, yes … but you look so good in them. I love saris!’
‘Then you wear them, na?’
‘I mean, I love women in saris – I mean, I love you in saris.’ He saw the look on my face and added, ‘I mean, I love you!’
JUST MARRIED, PLEASE EXCUSE Page 5