Encounters of a Fat Bride

  ‘Yes, doctor.’

  ‘I want you to dwell on the fact that there are more than just physical stereotypes.’

  My brows creased automatically.

  ‘Hear me out. You’ve complained that you’ve never had romance in your life. Have you ever initiated romance?’

  How could I? I was ‘the girl’ I thought, defensively. And right there. Right there was the doctor’s point!

  ‘Uh . . . no.’

  ‘Of course, initiating does not guarantee the blossoming of a romantic relationship. Let us forget about your school and college life. Consider your short stint with your fiancé. Did you ever initiate romance?’

  Okay, this was beginning to make me feel terrible.

  ‘I . . . I did initiate conversation.’ That drunk-dialling incident instantly came to mind.

  ‘Fair enough. Was there any reciprocation from the other end?’

  ‘Uh . . . yes. But . . .’

  ‘Just listen to me. I’m not bashing you or anything. I am trying to help you understand this better.’

  ‘So, is it safe to say that whenever you initiated something you got a response?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This means that there wasn’t a lack of interest on the other side. Maybe just a lack of courage to initiate.’

  ‘Well, if you put it like that . . .’

  ‘Yes or no.’

  ‘Maybe, yes.’

  ‘So, why can’t you be the one to initiate romance?’

  ‘Because . . . because . . .’

  ‘Because you’ve grown up with the notion that it’s always the man who has to go down on his knee.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘It’s completely understandable. You’ve labelled men as romantic just as people have labelled women as thin. But because you don’t fit into that label, it pricks you. And because you are not a man you don’t even see the ways in which you have generalized men.’

  What was this sorcery the doctor was using to make me sound like a hypocrite? Of course, I was crying by now. But that didn’t make the doctor stop. Mechanically, he offered me a few tissues from a box placed strategically between us. No consoling, no comforting. I was allowed to cry without being stopped.

  ‘Stereotyping people is human nature. And that’s not even the problem here. The problem is to be able to acknowledge the exceptions to the rules. It’s important to validate them, to make them feel equal. Most women might be thin, but fat ones are also women. Most men might be macho and romantic and confident but the shy ones are also men. If the idea is to have romance then does it matter who initiated it?’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ I sobbed, blowing unabashedly into the tissue.

  ‘Have you seen the excuse of a man that Harsh is? Do you really think I would be happy with an ugly loser like him?’

  My words came back to haunt me. How easily people like Harsh become losers for others! I have been on that side of the fence too and it has been rough. Harsh was not a loser. He was just grossly misunderstood. I dared to not even try to imagine what his struggle must have been like. People cannot even relate to such an issue, to such a problem, let alone understand and accept it. But I could. I could empathize with him. I could vouch that every little hardship he might have faced because of his anxiety disorder was valid even if nobody else in the world agreed.

  Dr Marwah waited patiently for me to leave and I took my time doing so. I was suddenly feeling lost. Where did this leave me? I’d made the discovery. I’d unearthed a heap of reality. But, nothing had really changed. I had to go back home where the after-effects of a tragedy could still be felt at times. I didn’t think I would be able to forget about all this anytime soon.

  When I reached the threshold of the room, I turned and said, ‘One last question, doctor.’ Of course, he smiled. He always smiled. It must get tiring.

  ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ I asked, hoping he would give me some direction.

  ‘It’s not necessary for you to do anything,’ he said and that is the last I heard from him . . . for a while.

  33

  135 days before the wedding

  Don’t judge me for trying to bump into Harsh outside his office for the third time in two days.

  Yes, I had decided to seek him out but not for any particular reason. I just wanted one good meeting with him, maybe over a coffee, even though I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see him. It had everything to do with my sessions at the psychiatrist’s clinic. The term ‘psychiatrist’ no longer made me think automatically of mental asylums. Consulting one had made me realize that more often than not they’re just professional listeners. The world needs more of them.

  The discovery of Harsh’s anxiety in front of women; the coincidence that he and I had never had romantic relationships in our lives; the fact that we were both somewhat in the same boat; that he was still trying to cope; the probability that no one in his life actually knew him; and, most of all, the truth that I had never initiated anything with him, with anyone rather, compelled me to do this: to seek him out.

  The plan was to reach his office and then come up with a spontaneous plan of action. So that’s what I attempted to do at first. Obviously, it was a terrible idea but I didn’t know it then. I had waited outside his office the previous morning. I had reached early enough to avoid missing his entry into the building. But it took just three seconds of spotting him to send me packing, deciding never to do this again.

  However, I bravely made a second attempt this morning, driven by the nagging need to correct something I hadn’t really wronged. I wanted to tell Harsh, somehow, that I didn’t think he was a loser. I had never really told him so, but I knew what rejection could do to a person—it could make you a loser in your own eyes. Maybe I needed to do this to clear my conscience. Maybe it was because I knew how it felt to be a misfit, to have no one understand your struggle. The reasons were plenty; the mission was one, but the agenda? I hadn’t figured that one out.

  On day two, I managed not to flee on seeing him. I was close to calling out his name but unfortunately, someone else called him at that moment and we couldn’t meet. A rather upbeat fellow, this man who was probably Harsh’s colleague, joined him outside the gate and the two chatted all the way up to the main office building, giving me no window of opportunity to intercept them casually. As I watched the ease with which he conducted himself with his colleague, Harsh seemed like an altogether different man. No one could guess from afar that this smiling, jovial, backslapping man was socially challenged when it came to women.

  In the last couple of days, I had done a little lay person’s reading on selective mutism and anxiety. From what I read, it was more of a phobia than a disability but nothing one couldn’t overcome with the right kind of support.

  On this third attempt, I had better chances of success. I had abandoned the idea of calling out to him. I just planned to be standing in some obvious spot near the gate and hoped to be noticed—a first for me. It was a fool proof plan since it’s not exactly difficult to spot me. This time I was hoping to ‘bump into him’ after work rather than before. Leaving my office about twenty minutes earlier, I made it over to his office in good time, definitely before he would be done. The only problem was that I had no idea how long I would have to hang around pretending to be passing by.

  I could’ve just called, you know? If only people had more guts, there would be so many more love stories.

  Calmly, I strolled outside the main gate as the evening blended into the night, cautiously peeping into the direction of the lobby for any signs of Harsh. I had seen him go inside in the morning so he had definitely made it to work. Unless he had left much earlier or there was another way out of the building, Harsh could not have missed my watch.

  My feet started to hurt from all the standing and loitering as my wait stretched to an hour with still no sign of Harsh. Finally, I had to admit that this was extraordinarily stupid. Why was I making such a pointless effort? What was the need to pretend to meet h
im by chance—was I running away from taking the first step again?

  No. If I have to do it, I might as well do it right—I gave myself a not-so-rubbish pep talk. I could just dial him, have a word, tell him that I was in the area and thought of catching up with him and it would totally not be weird. He would be too stumped to say anything, anyway. I was the stud between the two of us. There was nothing to be nervous about.

  Taming my stray strands of hair in the side mirror of a random car, I took my cell phone out of my handbag. Why was I so anxious to contact a man who already had anxiety issues of his own?

  I clicked on his contact number and the call button was bravely pressed. With every passing second, I got more and more nervous. Suddenly the first ring sounded—my cue to chicken out. But valiantly, I fought the urge to disconnect the line. The phone rang and rang and rang. Like a crescendo building up, I felt the ring progress to its natural end but right before the climax could turn into an anti-climax, Harsh picked up the call.

  ‘Hello?’ he said shakily, hesitation laced his voice.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, matching him tremble for tremble. We were two peas in a pod and now it was time to rewrite our story.

  34

  Umpteen days after the wedding

  Today, it is a year since my wedding (to Harsh, in case you’re wondering).Who would have thought? As I sit flipping through the wedding album on my lap, I can hardly believe how far Harsh and I have come in getting to know and love one another.

  Our story has been nothing less than a dramatic movie, what with all the rejections the break-up, discovering secrets, the reconciliation and of course, the famous, inevitable War of the Parents. Where is the drama in your love story if at least one side of the family isn’t dead against the wedding?

  My second innings with Harsh began on a much better note than the first one. This time, I had taken it upon myself to change him or at least undo the damage I may have done by calling off our wedding version 1. To say that he was awkward when I randomly landed up outside his office that day would be an understatement. But since he was awkward, he didn’t ask too many questions, giving me the upper hand in over the situation. I pretended as if it was totally normal for people who break engagements to suddenly show up and ask their exes out for coffee. And you know what? By the end of that coffee, it actually started to feel a little normal. Once I stopped thinking about how absurd this date was, when I stopped trying to identify the purpose behind the meeting and, more importantly, when I started enjoying the coffee and the company, it stopped bothering me that this was awkward. I initiated the conversation and Harsh kept it up. It was really just that easy to begin again.

  Then I decided to leave it at that. It’s true that I was open to something brewing between us, for real this time, but that was not the reason to befriend him again. So after the first meeting, I didn’t push for another, until about a week later when I woke up to one of Harsh’s famous forwards. This time his generic message didn’t irritate me. In fact, it made me smile because I knew the rationale behind it. He was thinking about me. He wanted to talk to me. This was his attempt to strike up a conversation and it was my turn to reciprocate. Harsh didn’t know it yet but I had started to figure him out. I decided to ask him out for a movie in the evening. So what if I’m the girl in the story? If the idea is to have romance then, does it matter who initiates it?

  On a side note, theatres are officially the best place to break the ice with socially awkward people. There’s no need for small talk, there’s no anxiety about keeping up the conversation, you can look like shit because it’s too dark to notice anything, you basically have to do nothing for a couple of hours and still get to go home after a successful date. And the best part—the armrest effortlessly teaches you how to hold hands. It’s as if you don’t even have to try (okay, maybe a little) and from gawkily avoiding skin contact on the first date, you suddenly can’t get enough of each other’s fingers on the fourth. Man, we were going fast!

  On our fifth date, I got an unexpected call from Mother thirty minutes after I had left home, asking me where I was.

  ‘Are you sure you’re with Anu?’ she said, giving me another chance to tell her the truth but what was I supposed to do? Just change my story and say, ‘No, I thought I was with Anu but turns out that the man sitting next to me in the theatre is actually Harsh.’ Of course, I had to stick to my story of being with Anu, even though I could see that my game was up.

  ‘Yes, mom. I’ll be home soon,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh, you’ll be home right away! Because I was just in the market and happened to bump into Anu. And unless my old eyes are mistaken I didn’t see you with her!’

  Damn! Could Anu not have gone shopping for one day? By this time, she was officially separated from Akshay. They were taking a little time apart to decide what to do next.

  You can imagine my plight at being caught red-handed by Mother. Telling them about Harsh after all the melodrama of the last few months could jeopardize the little thing that he and I had going. We weren’t even sure what we were doing spending all that time together. Apart from figuring out things between us, I now also had to figure out what I would tell my family. This was obviously going to be a disaster. Suddenly I was steering everything around me. I was the one point of communication since Harsh was too busy being anxious, my parents were too busy being parents and his parents were . . . well, irrelevant at that point.

  When I reached home, fully prepared to give them another cock-and-bull story about being called to the office for some urgent work, I was surprised by what happened next. Few minutes after I reached, the doorbell rang and, to my family’s shock, it was Harsh.

  What the hell was he doing? I knew how to handle the matter. This was not part of the plan. I gave an extra loud gasp on seeing him in order to show that I had no idea why he was at home.

  ‘Harsh, what are you doing here, beta?’ my mother asked firmly, balancing her kindness and animosity like a pro.

  ‘Yes, what are you doing here?’ I repeated quickly after her, trying my best to convey with my eyes that he needed to get the hell out but he totally ignored me.

  ‘Uncle, aunty, I need to talk to you both about Madhurima and me.’

  Madhurima . . . I liked that he used my full name. Not many did. And this was a totally inappropriate time to celebrate this fact.

  Grandma was enjoying this little skit being played out in front of her. I could see in her eyes that she was looking forward to whatever was about to start, excited to lend her expert advice on the matter.

  Avoiding my gaze completely, Harsh sat my parents down and began a conversation that was going to change my life forever. As he confidently launched into whatever it was that he was going to say, I felt like throwing up. I was not sure how my parents would take this. This was the same man they had wanted me to marry and after all that drama, I had been the one to call if off. And he was not even the main problem. The problem was his family. Things had got quite ugly between my parents and his towards the end of our first innings. Why was all this happening so fast?

  ‘I know all this might come as a big surprise to you,’ Harsh was saying. I was aware of the conversation only partially in all the panic. I retreated to the kitchen, too happy to flee the scene but I still heard the discussion in fragments.

  ‘But, beta, after everything . . .’ my father was saying.

  ‘I’m confused,’ my mother was saying.

  Grandma was quiet. Harsh had stumped her. And this alone should have qualified him to marry me.

  Some more jibber-jabber took place as I poured myself a glass of water but couldn’t manage to drink it. In a way, I was grateful to Harsh for tackling the matter alone, but I just couldn’t deal with the fact that this was happening. We could have planned how to do this. Why was it happening like this?

  ‘With your blessings and if Madhurima agrees, I would like to marry her,’ Harsh said smoothly, not an ounce of hesitation in his voice. Who was this man? And
what had he done with the nervous wreck I knew?

  Did Dr Marwah forget to mention that Harsh had an alter ego?

  I decided to go back to the living room, nervous but eager to tackle the matter and to see everyone’s reaction. And there Harsh was, confidently awaiting an answer from my parents. He’d never seemed this attractive to me and I’d never been this furious with him. Of all the opportunities he had had to be macho, he had to choose this one! As soon as I entered, Harsh flashed a smile at me, which conveyed a hundred emotions at once. (Finally, no more brotherly looks from him—yay!) Happiness, shyness, love, uncertainty, nervousness—that single moment contained everything. His anxious eyes seemed to be asking so many questions: Have I done the right thing? Are you happy with this? Do you love me too? Do you want to marry me too?

  I could actually feel the colour rising in my face. This man had just asked for my hand in a room full of people. I felt giddy with excitement. There were butterflies in my stomach or it might have been hunger.

  How could I not smile back? With a small nod, I let him know that he had done the right thing. That I was happy with this. That I loved him and I wanted to marry him. There were no formal proposals, no verbal confessions of love, in fact, no words at all. It was the single most beautiful moment of my life.

  My parents asked him for some time to think over the matter—their polite way of asking him to leave so they could catch hold of me and give me a good talking to!

  What happened next? More drama. When Harsh approached his parents, all hell broke loose. They rang up my parents and lectured them on how ‘loose’ their daughter was to be chasing their son after ‘they had called the wedding off’. When did that happen? They said they would rather their son never marry than marry me and a hundred other things that clarified that they were not on board.

  In turn, my parents took out their anger on me, telling me that keeping them in the dark had been absolutely wrong on my part and that they too weren’t in favour of the marriage. How ironic! Just a few months ago, these two families had brought us together and now they wanted us apart.