JUST MARRIED, PLEASE EXCUSE Read online

  Just Married,

  Please Excuse

  Yashodhara Lal

  To my family – for the material they provide.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART I: CAUTION MARRIAGE AHEAD

  1: Pop Goes the Question

  2: The First Date

  3: I Saw the Sign

  4: Meeting the Parents

  5: Marrying a Sharma

  6: The Honeymoon

  7: Settling Down

  8: Going Shopping

  9: Opposites Attack

  10: The Proud Landowners

  11: Driving Miss Crazy

  12: The Ladies Man

  13: Of Chai in Jaipur

  14: Of Alu Gobi in Delhi

  15: A Home of Our Own

  16: Bye Bye Bangalore

  PART II: ROUGH ROAD

  1: I Get By With a Little Help from My Help

  2: The Social Circle

  3: I’m WHAT?

  4: What’s Up, Doc?

  5: Make Way for Peanut

  6: The Peanut Arrives

  7: New Parents

  8: Enter the Kajal

  PART III: ! DISASTER ZONE

  1: The Homecoming

  2: Back On Bandstand

  3: Kajal Settles In

  4: The Princess and the Pea-brains

  5: All Ees Really Not That Well

  6: A Little Counselling Never Hurt Anyone. Much.

  7: Guess Who’s Coming to Visit?

  8: Hello Ji, Mummyji, Papaji

  9: Mo’ Counseling, Mo’ Problems

  10: A Birthday to Remember, Even if You Try to Forget

  11: A Fight of Volcanic Proportions

  12: Bye-bye, Thank You

  13: The Night Under the Stars

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART I

  CAUTION

  MARRIAGE

  AHEAD

  1

  Pop Goes the Question

  ‘A chha, I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Vijay said casually, over the phone. ‘When do you think we should get married?’

  The question caught me off guard since the only build up to it had been our wishing each other a rather soppy, lovey-dovey good morning. I paused for a moment to give it a considered response.

  ‘Eh?’

  I was never at my eloquent best when taken by surprise.

  I looked at my phone with raised eyebrows as if Vijay could see my questioning expression. Considering that we had been seeing each other for only three months, and that I was in my early twenties and just out of management college, I was completely unprepared for even the mention of marriage. But here it was – an unmistakable, undeniable, definite mention.

  ‘Married?’ I choked out the words with some difficulty. ‘Ha ha! You’re joking, right? I’m only twenty-three – a mere child. You want to be held directly responsible for child marriage? No, na?’

  I heard a by-now familiar, stifled sigh at the other end of the line. ‘Honey, mujhe pata hain you’re twenty-three. But I’m thirty, and I can only hold my parents off for so long. You know they’re starting to look for arranged marriage matches for me. Again.’

  I did know this and didn’t particularly like it. I became petulant. ‘So tell them to butt out. Or maybe,’ I added spitefully, ‘you should just go and marry some Harbinder or Buntvinder that they choose for you.’

  ‘Buntvinder?’ he chuckled. ‘That’s not even a real name. But tumhare liye achha hain, actually – my little Buntvinder. Ha ha.’

  He sensed I was not amused, and his voice became serious again. ‘Look, we are eventually getting married, right? So why not now?’

  ‘Vijay! We’ve only been going out for three months …’

  ‘Arrey! I’m old-fashioned … I don’t understand all this going-out, shoing-out stuff. I thought you were as serious about it as I am.’

  ‘Of course I am as serious about it as you are. I just didn’t know that you were so … serious!’

  This time, his sigh was not as stifled as the previous one. ‘Okay then. I guess we’ll talk about it some other time. See you in the evening.’

  Exchanging goodbyes that were a little colder than usual, we hung up, and I flopped my head back onto my pillow. I was definitely not prepared for a discussion like this. Besides, it was one of those beautiful chilly Saturday mornings in Bangalore which are best spent lazing in bed. So although it was already 9 a.m., I had still been in the process of waking up when Vijay had called. He, on the other hand, had taken the early morning flight for a day-trip to Delhi and had already been up for about five hours before he called me. He thus had the unfair advantage of a fresh and alert mind.

  I realized sadly that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep now anyway, and thought I might as well make some sort of an attempt to get out of bed. I looked around the sparse room of the company guest house in which I was staying and decided it wasn’t even worth trying to get the so-called caretaker to make me a nice refreshing cup of tea. That dude was even grumpier than I was in the mornings. Despite the severe handicap of no tea, I bravely managed to push myself out of bed and spread my arms wide and yawned, indulging in a long, slow stretch. It looked like it would be an empty sort of day – a Saturday without Vijay was no fun.

  Yeah, but still … Twenty-three, I reminded myself, was just too young to get married.

  I briefly considered telling myself that perhaps I was actually very mature for my age, but then rejected that on the grounds that it was a blatant lie. I definitely wasn’t ready.

  How did you know you were ready, anyway?

  In any case, I wasn’t altogether convinced I was the marrying type at all. I’d always liked to think of myself as a bit of a wild, free spirit. And right now, I had most of that beautiful decade – my twenties – ahead of me. Full of possibilities for adventure, exploration, thrills and – who knew, I thought a bit fancifully, maybe even a spot of danger. All this, notwithstanding the fact that I had just finished my MBA and entered the corporate world, as an employee in a large, staid MNC. Still. There could be some form of danger while peddling soaps and detergents.

  But the only danger now seemed to be of getting trapped in a domestic rut and becoming a house-minding, wifely Buntvinder myself. The self-image that this conjured up in my mind inspired me immediately to start the day with a workout. And so I lay down and began to practise some contortions I had seen on the Yoga DVD I had obtained about a month ago from my mother. Even while I struggled to breathe correctly – or rather, to just breathe – during the dhanurasana, sarvangasana and other assorted asanas, I couldn’t get our conversation out of my mind.

  I knew that Vijay’s parents knew nothing of my existence. They had been pressurizing him to get married for a while now, and had been lining up ‘meetings’ with nice girls from respectable families all over the country, but mostly from his hometown of Jaipur. ‘A t least just meet her’ was their constant refrain. To oblige them, sometimes he did.

  I had discovered that even before I had come into his life a few months ago, Vijay had found his own unique, rather intriguing way of getting his parents to ease up on the topic, if only temporarily.

  He would simply get himself rejected.

  It was quite a feat for him to get rejected – tall, good-looking, IIT-Delhi graduate from respectable brahmin family, working in large MNC and all that jazz. Still, he manfully rose to the task and achieved it through the simple means of being obnoxious.

  During each of these meetings, there would inevitably come a point when he and the girl were left alone to get to know each other better. He would act
normal enough to begin with. Then, at some stage, he would clear his throat, look deep into her eyes, and say in a low, serious voice, ‘Look, Buntvinder (example of name). Before we think about whether we should take things any further, there is something I have to ask you.’

  She would lower her eyes and reply breathlessly, ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It’s something very deeply personal, and I’ll understand if you don’t want to answer it.’

  ‘It’s okay, you can ask me.’

  ‘It’s just that for me – and I hope for you – marriage is not a thing to be taken lightly. So I really need to know this …’

  She would be very nervous by now, but would steel herself in preparation for the worst. ‘It’s okay, Vijay! What is it you want to know?’

  ‘I just need to know,’ he would lower his voice even further and after a dramatic pause for effect, say, ‘Who was the first Mughal emperor of India?’

  The ensuing silence would only be broken by the sound of his loud guffaws at the look on her face. The responses ranged from huffy walk-outs to cushions thrown at his head. Either way, the girl would get the message that this wasn’t a suitable boy, although the parents involved were never exactly sure why.

  Being an easygoing and open-minded sort of chap, Vijay was not opposed to introducing a variation once in a while. As in the case of the overly sweet and sensitive young girl that he met in Jaipur, whom he didn’t have the heart to try the usual Mughal emperor prank on.

  Instead, after around twenty minutes of conversation – nervous and shy on her part, friendly and encouraging on his – he sidled up to her, making her back further into the sofa they were sitting on. He gazed into her eyes and murmured, ‘You are one of the sweetest girls I have ever met in my life.’ As she blushed in flustered confusion at this unexpected display of forwardness, he put his arm around her shoulders and whispered in her ear, ‘And don’t worry, I will personally find a nice boy for you.’

  The poor girl was in tears by the time he left. Finally, his parents had eased up on the match-fixing efforts. Only temporarily, of course.

  When I had first seen Vijay in the office three months earlier, my first thought had been, ‘Wow, that guy has long legs – where do they make pants his size?’ He was a tall, lanky young man with smooth hair, and a boyish-looking face that belied his thirty years.

  I was only a lowly management trainee, fresh out of IIM-Bangalore, and Vijay had been in the organization for several years. We both worked in the marketing department, and had been introduced by his boss Madhukar, who also happened to be my project guide. I was impressed by Vijay from the beginning – that is, I thought he was cute. I liked him even more when I got to know him better and found that he was a laid-back, down-to-earth young man, with an extremely quirky sense of humour. He stood out in the corporate environment – literally, because at six foot two, he also towered over most other people.

  The office campus was a beautiful one. It was built over a very large area of land on the outskirts of Bangalore, with plenty of greenery around. The building itself was a quaint old structure, and from the outside was more reminiscent of an ancient castle than a modern office. You would enter through large ornate doors into a spacious lobby, upon the walls of which hung some great works of art – priceless pieces by M.F. Hussain and the like. There was even an impressive bronze statue of a raging bull, bang in the centre of the lobby. The fact that it faced away from the lobby entrance, and therefore you had a bull’s backside greeting you every morning as you entered the office, did little to detract from the timeless charm of the building.

  So, this was where we first met. Where our little romance started. Where we took many after-lunch strolls, around the campus. Where I once caught a glimpse of Vijay sitting at the large window of his ground-floor room, gazing outside in deep thought, immersed in what was probably some important business problem. I had watched him admiringly for a few moments, thinking how picturesque the scene was, and trying to come up with an appropriate title for it in my head, something like ‘Long-legged Professional Contemplation’. Exactly at this point, the object of my scrutiny had coolly swung his legs over the sill and slipped out of the office in one smooth motion, presumably for a smoke. I was taken aback by his exiting in such a novel fashion and had thought for the first time – but certainly not the last, ‘Man. That dude is weird.’

  Later, I asked him out of curiosity what he thought when he first met me. He replied spontaneously – a bad habit he would soon learn to curb to some extent – ‘I thought, Arrey yaar, here’s yet another trainee to waste my time – but she’s a rather cute jhalli.’

  I didn’t really know at the time what the term ‘jhalli’ meant, but I could sense it wasn’t anything very complimentary. Vijay never offered compliments unless they were double-edged – part of his charm, I supposed.

  He had done his share of stretching the truth to try and impress me. When he learnt that I was into music and playing the guitar, he said casually, ‘Oh really? You know, I played the drums in college.’

  This greatly raised him in my esteem. It was only later that I discovered that he had been referring to one specific occasion ten years ago when he had happened to pass by the auditorium, seen the IIT rock band members taking a break during practice, and had banged about a bit on their drum set for a pleasant five minutes.

  He also mentioned that he had been on the college volleyball and basketball teams – this was easy to believe, given his height, and later turned out to have the plus point of being true as well. When it finally hit me that he was giving me all this information in order to try and flirt with me in his own unique, subtle and slightly sardonic way, I was quite floored – here was a musical, athletic, handsome and nice older man who seemed intent on winning me over. It had seemed too good to be true.

  And clearly, I now thought a tad bitterly as I struggled to unravel myself from a particularly complicated asana whose name I could no longer recall, it had indeed turned out to be too good to be true.

  The lad was already talking marriage. Talk about killing a perfectly good romance.

  Typical.

  2

  The First Date

  Vijay was due back in Bangalore later the same day, at 8 p.m. It was about 7 p.m. when it struck me that it would be nice to surprise him by going to the airport to pick him up. I realized with a little start of guilt that every single time in the last three months that I’d had to travel on work, he had picked me up or dropped me off at the airport – whereas it had occurred to me only now, for the first time, that I could pick him up too. Especially since my guest house, strategically chosen at a mere stone’s throw from his house, was also fortituously located a short distance away from the airport. But my sense of remorse was quickly overtaken by resentment. Just because I was an innately selfish person – a fact that I immediately decided to blame on my faulty upbringing by my mother – it didn’t mean that Vijay could go about always playing Mister Nice Guy and being all thoughtful about every little thing and making me look bad in comparison. It hit me that being cooped up in my guest house, waiting for Vijay to come back, had quite possibly addled my brain. A breath of fresh air would do me some good.

  I was still in a contemplative mood as I slouched along Airport Road. Maybe Vijay’s acting all thoughtful and gallant was a scheme to trap me into marriage. Maybe he would start acting completely different once we got hitched. Well, I wasn’t just some naïve silly girl. I was a savvy woman of the world – and I wasn’t going to fall into any sort of trap.

  I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I stumbled on a loose slab on the pavement and nearly fell into an open manhole. After loudly cursing the civic authorities of Bangalore, I was reminded of how I had already demonstrated my clumsy side to Vijay on various occasions, and had been saved at least twice from a sudden and imminent death on a busy road by his long, steadying arm. It was kind of nice to be with a man who continued to think of me as hot stuff despite prolonged exposure to my kl
utziness. Besides, my own personal survival rate would possibly improve simply by virtue of having that long, steadying arm around. These were no doubt fairly useful qualities to have in a potential husband.

  Husband. Ewww.

  I finally reached the entry gate to the airport and negotiated my way past the many vehicles moving at a mere crawl, until I found myself at the Arrival gate. It was crowded to the hilt, as usual. I cleared my throat, tossed my hair back and gave a few of the local men a haughty look until they meekly shuffled aside. I then proceeded to occupy a prime waiting spot near the front where I could comfortably lean on the steel bars as I waited for Vijay to make his appearance.

  It was still fifteen minutes to eight, and I found my mind beginning to wander again as I waited moodily, my baggy-jeaned skinny frame hunched over the bars.

  Had it really been three months already? It seemed like only yesterday that we had gone out on our very first date.

  When Vijay first suggested that we go out that fateful day, he did so in a deliberately casual manner. Determined to outdo him, I accepted in a manner bordering on careless indifference.

  ‘Oh sure. Whatever. I mean, I don’t care.’ For good measure, I even added something along the lines of ‘I go out with anyone who asks me.’

  He looked at me appraisingly and I realized this hadn’t sounded too good, so I deftly changed the subject. ‘So where do you think we should go?’

  He thought for a while and then, with a gleam in his brown eyes, he asked me, ‘Would you like to see ducks?’

  This was a question I had never been asked before, but I decided to just go with the flow and said in the same casual manner, ‘Yes, of course.’

  That afternoon, I found myself getting a little worried. I had no idea what to expect and was vaguely apprehensive that ‘seeing ducks’ was perhaps in fact some sort of secret code for acts I was not yet ready for – or even worse, that he might be planning to take me to the Bangalore zoo.

  That evening he picked me up from my guest house. I walked up to his car, a dark green Hyundai Accent. As I got in next to him, he said, ‘Hey, you’re looking nice.’ I was congratulating myself for the wise but unusual decision of wearing a skirt and applying some lipstick when he added, ‘Nicer than you usually look.’ My smile froze on my face, but he looked like he hadn’t noticed anything amiss. I would learn later that Vijay usually said whatever popped into his head. This was always without any malice whatsoever, but still difficult for a slightly oversensitive person like me to digest. Right now, however, he appeared to be in a very happy, conversational mood, and I melted as it dawned on me that he was talking about making this a very special first date – he was planning to drive us two hours out of Bangalore to ‘see ducks’ at a little resort right on the Cauveri river. I settled back in my seat with a delicious feeling of anticipation, put on my seat belt, and we zoomed off.