A Suitable Ploy

There are many undue privileges our snobbish generation has and ignores. We know nothing of the tribulations generations past have endured. We appreciate too little the liberties we’ve been handed. With our exuberance and disrespectful excesses, we have all but forgotten the lives of our grandfathers. Times when the man of the house had an average of ten mouths to feed. When there were children to be clothed and sent to school. There were houses to be taken care of. Aging parents to be nursed. Daughters to be married off.

There was this trope my adorable granddad used to remind us of from an Annavru film: The septuagenarian patriarch, father of half a dozen nubile daughters, sitting on the front porch of his house and questioning the postman delivering letters of his gotra-nakshatra. The poor man was so drained of energy, having arranged for the first of his daughters, husbands and appropriate ceremonies that he attempted to quickly get his last daughter hitched to the postman(there was no Shaadi.com then).We would all laugh. Half a laugh for the tragicomic modalities having daughters entailed. The remaining guffaw was spat just because anything our remarkably funny granddad said warranted laughter. The postman of course was asked to scoot after he recited not just his nakshatra but that of his wife and little children. “What do you little ones know about our times. Of the difficulty of marrying off daughters.” He would say to us during his post-nap story sessions.

His daughter, my mother, however shares none of his good humor. Amma is stuck in a time-warp. In her head, PV Narasimha Rao(who she shares her birthday with) is still prime minister. Liberalisation is not a word. And daughters are still difficult to marry off. And so she has dived head-first into an all-cylinders campaign to marry me off to some suitable boy.

Me. Twenty mood swings a minute me. Twenty Two years old. Eats like a ruffian. Bawls like a baby. Agile as a polar bear in hibernation. Has the memory of a goldfish and social preferences matching that of Jane Goodall. Me, settled. Into domesticity. A pretty picture no?

You see, it isn’t me my mother is worried about. My impeccable record for staying out of any trouble of glamorous/amorous kinds silently vouches for me better than I can, verbally. She is worried about herself. She is constantly paging into and out of that room in her mind where anonymous judges rate her on how good a mother she is. Then again, you have to understand that my mother is a little rusty. She has fallen out of habit of being a mother. It’s been a while. It’s like she launched into a stellar parenting career with my sister with so much zeal and enthusiasm when my sister was born and did such a good job of it until she had her married off, that it was simply not interesting enough anymore with the other offspring. I won’t fault her for it. It is like Poker. You get a good hand, you go break the bank. You get a sloppy hand, you fold and do something else. In that sense, I am the equivalent of being dealt Eureka Forbes business cards in a game of high-stakes poker. That is no secret.

But then marriage is a completely different ballgame. It is like a bonus round in Mario. Like the Super Over in IPL. It demands frenzy and drama and in some cases acrobatics. How can my mother resist a piece of this? What Will They Say, besides?

My mother who until now has been like a pained babysitter, who I had to grudgingly endure and ignore when she taunted me about the state of my room is now treating me like a grown, mature adult who is to be talked to in reasonable terms/tones. She doesn’t even say anything when I stay out late. Why, she even discussed manicures the other day. Brrr.

I often quote the movie Good Advice. In which Charlie Sheen says something to the effect of ‘You are young, emotionally unavailable, beautiful (and stupid); any man will love you’ to Denise Richards. My mother is easy to love. If only it weren’t for the pesky intelligence. She has shut me up with strokes of genius I have only begun to understand. Our conversations go this way:

Amma: So Auntie/Ajji/Thaata/Next-Door-Neighbor X was telling me about this boy. Working in <NYSE listed company>.

Me: Ok, you have my approval. <Chuckle. What comic timing! Pat pat!>

Amma: <Variant of I will drive a sledgehammer through your skull>

*Hits refresh button and regains composure*

Amma: So, should we go ahead? <In her most grown up voice>

Me: Amma, I told you. No. Non. Nei. Illa.

Amma: <Switches to ‘80s Kannada Film Amma disposition> Don’t spite me. You don’t know how they(who this refers to, I will never find out) speak. You aren’t all that young you know?

Me: <unintelligible>

Amma: ok. How many years? Two?

Me: TEN

Amma: Four

Me: Six

Amma: Ok then. I won’t bother you until then.

Me: <Victory sign>

Amma: Which means you won’t find some huduga in the interim and come bounding up to me.

Me: Wait, wha?

Amma: <Is doing victory dance in the kitchen. She won’t have a Pashtun speaking son-in-law. Family honor locked up in a chastity belt.>

I underestimate my mother. How my father made space for her cunning intelligence in their long, eventful marriage, I comprehend not. I console myself, thinking it is not without reason her own father cracked jokes about daughters being difficult to marry off. I realize now he was only half joking. I have had at least three variants of that conversation in front of different audiences so far. That doesn’t mean Amma shies away from more drama.

It is genuinely difficult to come up with original reactions when your mother finds you hanging up the phone and asks you immediately how much older the person on the other end is. It is slightly creeping out when she smiles and nods satisfied when you distractedly say ‘a year’. She waits a while before she asks ‘Iyer or Iyengar?’ and I go and dunk my head in a bucket of water.

Author’s note: I did not make that shit up.

 

“There are only two conditions I have to the man you will choose” Amma says while I ransack my room for earplugs. “He must be at least two years older.” Repeating the family tenets for finding good husbands. Apparently women age faster. And so they must choose older husbands to keep looking like they are not Mother and offspring. Assorted aunts’ words. Not mine. Amma, speaking in the voice of all the family’s women continues: “Second, he should be an eligible bachel-“ Your writer is by now running down a flight of stairs with a solitary sock jutting from her ear.

You may accuse me of lying. You may declare that my reluctance is insincere. What is wrong with getting married? Surely you are legally eligible for the stamp of matrimony. It isn’t like there is a long line of suitors lined up outside your balcony reading out poetry to you.  Oh wait, there aren’t even enough men who read to make a decent line anyway. Unless you were at Tishani Doshi’s book signing.

Yes, intelligent reader, my reluctance is wholly insincere. It isn’t like I haven’t considered the idea myself. Why not. Marriage is the one destination to which all the thought-trains my mind conducts with a ridiculously skewed sense of time.

1)     1)Complete boredom and need for some cathartic plot change in life. 

2)      2)Point blank bafflement with the diktat of this century that demands that a woman spend 45 hours a week at a desk to buy the odd designer handbag, when clearly being a woman is a difficult enough job; And considering the appraising looks all of us suffer in roads men built it isn’t wrong to agree that womankind is eternally at the unpaid employ of man(Ok. Bad one. I concede).

3)      3)A career that is going absolutely nowhere.

4)      4)Bangalore traffic.

 Notice how marrying a rich NRI type would solve all these troubles?

But whattodo, whattodo. Hot, eligible, single, straight, rich NRIs are hard to come by. I even approached experts to do some head-hunting. One of my great-aunts, a pro in these matters promised to “start scouting for eligible, young NRIs” with a wink. I responded with a very honest “Have fun, ajji” and a reciprocal wink.

She hasn’t spoken to me since.

Thus ended my attempts at ensnaring a pardesi. I was not to be deterred. Home-grown maal ain’t so bad you know. I once spotted a twenty something type in traditional gear, with a badass tattoo running down his arm. At a temple mind you. I gave him a triumphant smile and a discreet thumbs-up as he walked past me discussing thrash metal with his narcotics and schizophrenia-aided imaginary friend.

I have had some other assistance in these matters. Other relatives have trapped me in conversations in which they make me fill verbal questionnaires as if they could manufacture a man of my liking.

 “Tell me Siri, what kind of boy, you want.” Said a retired grand-uncle who convinced me that the only way they would be rewarded with the privilege of a visit by my happily-married (see!) resident sister and husband from overseas was if I did something major. Like get engaged.

 “Good looking. Rich. Sid Mallya type”

 “But for that you have to be Deepika Padukone-type, no? Ho ho ho”

<Applause and laughter all round>

I know, right? Ouch.

My relatives have made a sport out of locating and stepping on raw nerves. Sigh. Right, right. I digress. At this point, if you’re still with me, you are understandably wondering how I went from hunting down eligible bachelors with sizeable bank balances to running away from any mention of the M word.

Frankly, I don’t know either. The answer lies, I am guessing, in the clinical time-capsule I spend the majority of my life in these days. In that sterile, soul-less space called The Real World in popular parlance. Where a room one takes breaks in has no windows. In their stead, there are pictures of happy people, as if they were natural substitutes. People jumping in the air, arms and legs spread out, like they were hugging the universe and shouting out their victories. It is in their extreme joy that you call their bluff. We may be young. But we know that joy has no place without its little pains. The agony of uncertainty. And the gentle mirth of secrecy. Those song-writers knew what they were talking about.

I was sipping on a glass of water at Work, staring at these images. You would think that the woman in the picture on the wall is happy, with her obviously beautiful smile and her perfect, mid-air split. Even in spite of the teeth marks someone thoughtfully left on her pants.

I have encountered a respectable number of sleazeballs. None beats a certain acquaintance, verily married and aging who eyes young females of the species he resembles with a candour you would want to award him a medal for. Then there is his wife, past her prime, having lost the plot and begging the validation she misses from known sources, with everyone she stumbles upon. And to think that you knew them when they were madly in love. Passive heartbreak of this sort is enough to prepare you to willfully buy real-estate in Cougar-Town. We like happy-endings too much to see things fall apart this way. Besides what a failure and waste of life it would be to let a measly man be the source of all your misery. At least go terrorize a country and get shot. Much more glorious, no?

Quite another matter that my mum thinks I’m fully capable of meeting such an end rather than finding a good husband. It is for this reason that she is so anxious to find me my soul mate with the help of nakshatras and family friends who know ‘good families’. It is for this reason she is pulling all stops. It is for this reason she has taken to repeating her father’s treasured postman-nakshatra-joke, a tad too seriously. It is for this reason I am glad she has learned to use e-mail.