His expression remained grave.
‘I didn’t. I thought you liked them.’
I leapt out of the bed in frustration. ‘Why! Why do you always have to assume! I wanted everyone to know that it was a “no” from me! Not from them! I have rejected them. They have not rejected me!’ I said furiously.
‘But they have not rejected you at all, beta. They liked you. They want to meet again. Soon,’ said my father and that’s where everything changed.
10
368 days before the wedding
I was on the verge of insomnia those days. The night Father told me that Harsh Tripathi’s family was interested in meeting again, I didn’t sleep. Even the following day passed deep in thought.
I had been so sure of rejecting Harsh and it had nothing to do with him. This had become a game for me. Before they could say ‘no’, I was prepared to fling my refusal in their faces. But that’s the irony of life, it plays its trump card just when you think the game is over.
I didn’t want to admit it, but it was true that their positive response greatly affected my stand on the matter. It made me unsure of my refusal and I hated myself for this. It made me think again. Why was I rejecting Harsh exactly? I didn’t go gaga over him, but I didn’t despise him either. Actually, I just didn’t know him well enough to decide whether I liked him or not. How can one know in just one meeting? He wasn’t repulsive enough for me to turn him down so soon. He deserved a second shot, a second thought, especially because he thought that I deserved it too.
I remember skipping lunch the next afternoon. The situation had killed my appetite. Shocking, I know! I browsed through his images on my phone again and again. His looks (or the lack of it) didn’t bother me much. He was the shiest of the lot I had encountered so far.
I could accept his shyness. I could understand that he was thirty and still unmarried. I could understand everything suspicious about him but I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that he would want to take this further. With me? Lack of confidence in oneself can make one doubt even the best people.
Throughout my day at work, I was hyperventilating. My mind was filled with varied suspicious possibilities. Was he being forced to get married? Because he was gay? They knew we weren’t filthy rich so money was not likely to be the motive. Was he impotent? And was that why he was agreeing to marry me? The impotency angle really frightened me. Fat girls also dream of macho guys, crazy sex and mind-blasting orgasms. I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet.
Unfortunately, even the happiness of getting a positive response from a seemingly nice family turned bittersweet because I suspected major fishy business behind their decision to meet me again.
It’s amazing how Harsh’s acceptance (well, sort of) of me greatly changed my mind about him. Some of us are so hungry for love and acceptance that we automatically love and accept the ones who give it to us. I took my time to agreeing to see him, one-on-one this time, but I’m sure everyone at home already knew that I would meet him again.
That night there were waterworks at home again. Ma and Grandma had not learnt their lesson from being overexcited the first time. Nothing could be done about them. They were incurable emotional fools. I was nervous like I had never been before. Absurd as it was, this would be my first date with a boy. At twenty-five. Yes.
With an evident bounce in his voice, Father rang up the Tripathis to let them know of my go-ahead. He made the call from the living area and I stood next to the door of my room and listened carefully. Their conversation appeared to be normal, which was a relief, until I heard a disappointed ‘Oh’ escape my father’s lips. The entire house became deathly quiet. Mother clutched the armrest of the sofa. My palms grew moist with sweat. Even my usually unfazed grandma was nervous. Who would have thought it was possible?
I told myself not to imagine the worst. No, they could not have changed their mind. I kept repeating this in my head. Father’s voice became fainter as my thoughts grew louder.
‘No, problem,’ I heard him say and my heart sank a little more but I tried to be positive.
‘Lightning never strikes the same place twice,’ I told myself aloud. I didn’t want to eavesdrop further so I shut the door tightly and lay down on my bed. Gently this time. The dramatic jumps had been missing from my life for a while. Would they be making a comeback?
A few minutes later, there was a knock on my door. Mother, Grandma and Father walked in. They didn’t seem particularly tense. I sat up and played it cool despite the urgency of my curiosity.
It turned out that Harsh was going to be out of the country on business for the next few days. Ten to be precise. He was a tech guy who dealt in computer hardware and often travelled abroad for trade exhibitions. That’s all I knew of his profession.
It was a relief that THAT was the disappointing news Father had to convey, but once I was alone, the anxiety only grew. A lot could go wrong in the coming ten days. He could change his mind on his trip to Germany. He could find a skinny girl and fall in love with her during the trip. Of course, he could change his mind even if he weren’t going, but the ten-day gap and distance made me fret. I wanted to meet him soon, to seal the deal or break it, or at least move forward in some direction. Hanging in the middle just made things too uncertain and unpredictable. In a way, knowing it was a ‘no’ was better than this. It scared me to believe that there was a chance of finding my fairy tale come true only to have the dream snatched away. No one but I would ever understand the emotions I felt, the thoughts I reflected upon, the things I imagined in that phase.
The night ended on a happy note for a change. Putting aside negative thoughts, I deliberately thought of Harsh. He hadn’t given me much to think about but I replayed that evening he visited my house again and again in my head and sometime while doing that, I fell into a peaceful sleep.
11
356 days before the wedding
Ten days later, Harsh returned from his big-shot business trip. His family was of modest means but his academic accomplishments had been a game-changer. With an impressive MBA, Harsh had got a handsome pay package for his first job at an IT firm. A few years later, he and his colleague left the firm to start their own venture. Apart from hardware, they also dealt in software solutions. Of course, I got to know all this much later in our story. Back then all I knew was that he was in the city again and I was to meet him for coffee that evening.
I planned to take a half-day at work, but ended up taking the entire day off thanks to my overenthusiastic mother and control-freak grandmother. They had an instruction for everything, from what I would wear to what I would say and eat at the coffee shop, swiftly turning my anxiety into a panic attack. While I was on the verge of vomiting due to nervousness, a massive debate was on in my bedroom over the effect of the colour red on my skin tone.
‘Look how beautiful the colour is looking on her, mummy. She looks like a bride already,’ my mother said to her mother holding against my face a red dress she had bought for me recently despite my protests.
‘That’s exactly what we want to avoid. Don’t scare the poor boy away. I think she needs to wear black. It makes her look thin and tall like a model,’ Grandma offered her expert advice. Considering Grandma’s love for magazines, her knowledge of what a conventional model looked like was rather poor.
‘But black is so dull. She should wear a red dress. There should be vibrancy in her appearance.’
‘No. She should wear a black T-shirt and jeans with bright red lipstick and red heels.’
I had to intervene at this point.
‘I don’t own red lipstick or red heels,’ I managed to pipe in, but why would a fact like that deter their heated discussion? There’s no space for logic when mothers argue.
Ignoring them, I started to get ready as per my own idea of what I should wear for coffee in the middle of a bright and sunny day.
I wondered if Anu had had to go through so much preparation for her initial meetings with Akshay. Did her mother have to sit and de
cide what she should wear and how she should be? Surely not. But she was in a different league altogether. She didn’t need to be told what to do with a boy on a date, how to speak, how to behave in order to seem appealing and desirable. Anu owned such things. She could open a coaching class or two. And the best part was that she didn’t try too hard. She was a natural. Confidence exuded from every inch of her. If only it could cover a fraction of all my inches. Sigh!
Father had told me to meet Harsh at 5 p.m. at Coffee & Co. It was a well-known cafe in our area but a little far away for Harsh, who stayed on the other end of the town.
At 4.30 p.m., I was ready to leave. Mother and Grandma stood at the door, sulking over my rather ‘simple’ attire of jeans and a t-shirt.
‘Nothing is matching,’ Mother complained sorrowfully. My mother does not understand the concept of contrast, she never has. In all my childhood photographs, if you see an object with a burst of a single colour from top to bottom, you will know that that object is me. Painful memories.
Just as I was about to leave, Mother asked me to wait. She rushed into the kitchen and came back with a spoonful of curd. I consumed it obediently. I felt like I was in school again, appearing for an exam—only worse.
‘I’ll get the car,’ Father said and left. He was going to drop me and would pick me up as well. For a date. To fix my wedding. Yes.
‘Have fun,’ Mother said and sent me off with a peck on the cheek.
‘Try not to laugh like a hyena,’ Grandma said and I countered her advice right then. She’s funny once you stop taking offence at her constant jibber-jabber.
I was jittery and restless all along the way. How badly would this date go? I had no idea what to expect. What if Harsh asked me whether I was a virgin? Should I be honest? Or should I be a schmuck and pretend that I’d done it with my boss? Or should I be vague and ask him in turn? Eventually I decided that I’d just throw my coffee in his face and leave if he asked me that. (Spoiler alert—that doesn’t happen).
As soon as I got out of the car, I couldn’t wait to get back, back into my house, into my pyjamas and into my comfort zone. But it had to be done, so I put my apprehensions aside and walked towards my date with a smile on my face.
Once I entered the coffee shop, I quickly scanned the area only to find that Harsh hadn’t reached yet. I had his phone number but decided to wait. I could tame my rebellious hair and look a little less like a lioness on the loose before he arrived. I made a hasty visit to the washroom, wiped off the obvious layer of lipstick only enough to make it look like I had ‘naturally’ pink lips. Someone tried to open the washroom door and my heart jumped in the typical way that the heart jumps when people try to walk in on you in the washroom, but luckily I had locked it. I brushed my hair twice to domesticate the bush it had become but it was of no use. When I came out of the washroom, I saw a man nervously fixing his hair in front of the mirror outside. It took a moment to realize that it was Harsh. We both looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was a good ice-breaker.
As we settled into our seats at a corner table, we first ordered our drinks and then began talking (by talking I mean that I spoke and he nodded from time to time). The little he spoke was about his work. I cracked a few nervous jokes that didn’t deserve a single chuckle but Harsh laughed goofily on one or two occasions. His slightly crooked nose wrinkled whenever he laughed. His almond-shaped eyes looked here and there. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone. Chest hair threatened to jump out of it. It was distracting, not in a good way. He sat with his arms crossed like a stubborn kid throwing a tantrum but his polite smile was endearing. He seemed encouraging and sweet but still quite shy. I had to make most of the effort to talk and start new topics of conversation.
Harsh didn’t strike me as very outgoing. While that may have been a negative aspect about him, there was also something simple about his nature (and his nerdy laughter) that appealed to me. Some of my doubts were cleared in the first meeting. I reckoned he wasn’t gay. Somehow you can just tell. About the other angles, I would still have to see. We spoke nothing about marriage or the future and that was a relief.
I tried to imagine how we must have looked to passers-by. When I was in school I would look at all those couples who went on dates to coffee shops. The boys were dreamy, handsome, so much older than me that they would give me that ‘oh, what a sweet baby’ look. I hated it. I wanted them to look at me the way they looked at their dates. Cracking jokes, laughing more than necessary and being charming. I learned later that that was called flirting. And the girls! The girls had silky hair, always coloured. They were grown up and their bodies were developed and they had their own purses like grown-ups do. They would be fashionably dressed in the latest tank tops and miniskirts and they would be reciprocating all the flirtatious gestures thrown at them with equal ardour; a lascivious pat here, a tickly nudge there. I wanted to grow up to reach that phase. I thought someday I would be here in such a situation too, with a new boy every two months. While none of that had happened during my college days, it was sort of happening now, but no one might have looked at us like I used to look at all those people. Neither Harsh nor I was the conventionally good-looking type. No little girl would be looking at me from afar and hoping to become like me when she was older. No matter how much we all evolve and realize that intellect and inner beauty are inimitable traits, there’s no denying that outer beauty is most appealing.
Coffee with Harsh was a confusing affair. There was no firm verdict in my mind as we progressed towards the end of our date. When the bill came, I offered to pay, saying he could pay the next time—my way of checking whether there would be a next time. I’m so sly, it’s awesome! Harsh took me up on my offer with little hesitation and it made for a refreshing change. The whole operation had lasted for about an hour. Poor Father must have been home for just fifteen to twenty minutes before I asked him to pick me up again.
On my way home, I analysed everything. I could tell that Father wanted to ask me several questions but hesitation was etched all over his face. I had to decide what I would tell my family before we reached home.
The positives were that Harsh was quiet, simple, straightforward and soft-spoken. On the other hand, these traits also made him boring. For every good point there was a bad one and vice versa. How the hell did people decide such matters?
There was still no verdict even as Father stationed our car into the parking spot. There was a flurry of questions as soon as I set foot in the house. It made me nervous. They sat me down full round-table-conference style and began asking question after question.
‘But why are you back so soon?’ mom inquired repeatedly.
‘How many girlfriends has he had?’
‘Are you going to meet him again?’
The worst one was, ‘Did he try to kiss you?’
No points for guessing who asked that one.
At the end of the chat, I was quite upset that my meeting with Harsh hadn’t lasted for hours (like how Anu described hers had when she first met Akshay). I knew it was wrong to do this but I had started drawing comparisons between Anu’s story and mine from day one. It did nothing except make me feel worse about myself.
After dinner, Mother came into my room and asked me what my take on the matter was. Did I want to see Harsh again? Was there any use pursuing the matter further? Could I see my future with him? I had spent the entire evening thinking about such questions. I tried to weigh the pros against the cons but the possibility that Harsh would turn me down now after a one-on-one meeting was killing my confidence. I wanted to know what he thought about me. Did my job interest him? Did he find the roundness of my face cute? Was the mole on my nose too repulsive? Did my freshly threaded eyebrows make a difference? Was he going to say ‘yes’?
I didn’t want to be the only one to say ‘yes’. That would make me look like a loser. I wanted to know what he would say before I gave my answer but there was no way of finding out. So bravely and reluctantly, I gave my famil
y a green signal for a few more meetings with Harsh. Now I just had to wait and see what the verdict from the other side would be.
12
349 days before the wedding
‘Wake up, drunkard!’ a playful, mocking voice said on the other end as I answered the incessant ringing of my phone, still half asleep.
Drunkard? Me? I suddenly sat up in bed with a jolt. It was broad daylight. And my head was throbbing. I looked around my room to find garments strewn all over. What the hell had happened the night before?
Let’s go back a little in the story.
13
350 days before the wedding
Anu’s wedding mania had begun. It was the day of her sangeet-cum-cocktail party. Many Indian weddings include music and dance events a day or two prior to the ceremony. Some families include cocktails on such occasions and teetotallers like me who get introduced to them at such events don’t know when to stop.
If Anu’s lavish engagement a few months ago was anything to go by, then it was only obvious that her wedding would be a grand affair. And she would look like a queen. I haven’t described her engagement yet because it was the same old story—she looked amazing (perfect hair, gorgeous outfit, make-up on point), Akshay looked incredible, the rings were beautiful, the ceremony was beautiful, I felt lonely, left out and jealous. Bleh.
It had been a few days since my coffee date with Harsh. In the interim, there had been no verdict from his family. My father had rung up senior Mr Tripathi a day after our coffee date to communicate my response. However, before he could do so, he was told that they would get back to him in a few days since ‘some urgent matter was being dealt with in the family’. We all knew what that meant! At least I did. It was time to bid adieu to this boy as well. But the day Anu’s wedding celebrations began, I vowed not to be affected by anything boy-related for the duration of the wedding. This was not the time to cry over my most definite lifelong virginity.
Encounters of a Fat Bride Page 4