Opposites Attract!

He was reading aloud again, pacing up and down.

It all makes no sense to me why my husband is appearing for his L.L.B. exam at the far end of his 4^th decade?

How much he loves to study! After we had both completed our post-graduation together in 1990s, my husband decided to do a full time M.B.A. from a foreign university after a gap of 15 years as a student. And now he has enrolled for a degree in Law from Mumbai University and today he is giving his law 5^th semester exam!

I, on the other hand, hate studying in spite of being in the field of education.

When we both sit with our laptops it is funny to notice how different our choice of reading is. He reads about government policies, property prices, and share market (ugh!). I will be reading a friend’s blog or writing something or downloading music.

Things get worse in the food front. We are like chalk and cheese! I will happily never enter the kitchen for the rest of my life if someone provides me tasty meals. My husband on the other hand finds cooking very satisfying and a stress buster too. He plans out his menu, searches for exotic ingredients and sauces, lovingly selects his veggies, chops them just right and churns out gourmet dishes which we drool over on weekends.

I make friends faster than you can spell the word “Friend”. I open up to complete strangers while the husband has his mouth shut like a Swiss bank locker most times. 

What’s the Indian Railways good for other than reaching your destination? You guessed it! The journey itself! I get comfortable with all my co-passengers and all the while have to bear husband’s poker face.

I love crime thrillers and psychopath movies while he can’t stand them. His taste in music mostly revolves around old Bollywood hits while mine range from Deep Purple and Bob Marley to nonsensical Honey Singh!

The differences are endless and too many to list here and as we complete 23 roller coaster years of togetherness, I romanticize and pen this for him.

We have changed in little ways in our effort to reach out to each other (like he actually agrees to finally adopt a pet dog in spite of his childhood fear of animals). I have learnt to quietly leave him alone while he watches his favourite channel- CNBC (Do they speak Latin on it?). We accept each other’s eccentricities and give each other space to develop our individuality. Maybe it is the differences that keep us interested in each other. We never hesitate to debate and argue our point of view and speak our minds openly, the cacophony never allows monotony to kick in.Most of all I think we complement each other like sweet and savoury flavours in a dish that destiny has designed.

Married life is never easy, more so when you have opposite personalities living under one roof,but what the hell,easy is boring! 

Inter-caste marriages and such other issues

My marriage to a handsome young boy from Bihar in the summer of '92 cannot be called an Inter-caste marriage in the true sense. It can however be called an Inter-cultural, inter-caste marriage. I being born in the Brahmaputra valley speaking Assamese, raised in a hybrid cultural assimilation and he to traditional rural North Indian culture at the banks of the Gandak (tributary of the Ganga).

My mother’s marriage to my father can’t be called an Inter-caste, inter-cultural marriage either. She being a Malayali Syrian-Christian from the southernmost state of India and my ‘Hindu’ father from the land of black magic and the famous Kamakhya Temple. Theirs was an Inter-caste, Inter-cultural, Inter-faith marriage in the real sense.
Explaining the intricacies of my lineage takes up many a social chit chats. Most people respond in startled surprise at my frankness. In a nation where almost 80% marriages are arranged by the parents and elders, my confessions seem too brash.
My relations with my in-law’s culture went through stages: childlike obsession bordering at infatuation for all things Bihari, to learning their cultural ethos, then frustration at the clash of social etiquettes and customs and finally adaptation to a convenient lifestyle and acceptance.
Now I understand, after celebrating 22 years of wedlock, it had been a long struggle from both our sides but love and patience triumphs in the end.

 I am no authority to comment on the advantages or disadvantages of such marriages vis-a-vis the parental arranged ones but being a parent of a daughter, I know that   when she chooses a boy to wed, I will ask for information on his family background, his education and his occupation but finally, give my blessings as she, being an adult by then, would have seen all of these herself and I trust her innate wisdom.

We live in the 21st century; our children freely interact with each other, why can’t they be trusted to find their own life partner?
I salute my parents and my In-laws for accepting this change a long time ago. God Bless them.

On Being Unladylike

I have a confession to make. I’m going to ignore the fact that this is a lousy place to make a confession. I think I don’t have a single ladylike bone (if there is such a thing) in me. I realized this many many summers ago. My earliest memory (now isn’t memory a fickle thing) is of this very gawky teenager dropping her big sister’s nail polish bottle and staring at the ugly spill on the floor. Why i picked up the bottle in the first place beats me, because I never knew what it was for anyway. I used to wear my sister’s hand me downs or her “designed” dresses. Yeah we are old; we belong to the era before readymade clothes. I remember staring at women’s magazines and wondering how they managed to look so pretty, totally ignorant about such things as make-up, hair style, waxing and what have you till almost my late 20s. These days I see girls who are in their single digit age discussing ombre hair and nail art (who ever thought of such atrocious things?).

When I got married and set up house, my dear hubby(God bless him), set up the kitchen, brought all the knick-knacks  and even taught me to make tea, cook daal, rice and a basic meal. The rest I learnt (literally) from around the country where ever we went on postings and had friendly neighbours (they are a rare thing, let me tell you).

 Embroidery is like Latin and Greek to me, i can’t seem to be able to even thread a needle. When i was in school and we had needle and craft classes, all my final products for submission looked so good (with 100% contributions from mother and sister) that my teacher never believed they were mine inspite of my eye lash batting looks!!! These days bad eye sight is a good excuse, but imagine me as a new bride in my in-laws house, when my extremely talented sister-in-law starts filling a whole bed cover with intricate creepers and flowers! And when my mom-in-law tells me to knead the flour for chappatis (I fibbed a stomach pain and disappeared into the toilet till the coast was clear!)

When we invite guests over for dinner i stick to safe dishes like Paneer, Chicken, Dal, rice or order dinner from outside. Wait, isn’t a get together with friends suppose to be fun and not a platform to show off your cooking skills? Then i die of guilt when we go over to exotic Moroccan or Malaysian dinner spread  and the hostess proudly  announces  “I made all the food myself!” and I practice my fake awe look and polish off a  few more hors-d’oeuvre!

I am so useless with art skills (painting, sketching, photography, paper cutting, even drawing a straight line) that when my daughter gets projects from school, no marks for guessing where i run to. She now has all the skills to handle those scary projects all on her own.

Now, being unladylike comes with a lot of disadvantages, especially since i am a mother of a very ladylike girl- she even has a blog called “All That Estrogen”! But i have an advantage- my better half (now that’s the reason why we call them that) is highly skilled in cooking. He loves to cook! The more exotic, the taster the dish he turns out. He loves buying the weekly vegetables, fruits and non-veg. He loves to plan the menu and has green fingers in our garden. My daughter and he sit and plan the furniture and other stuff when we move into a new house, choose the curtains and the paint for the walls. Thank heaven my daughter is quite ladylike and yes she bakes cup-cakes and does her own French manicure!

(Brownies my daughter baked yesterday!)