Marriage Political System

Recently I met an old friend of mine for lunch. He is single. "How is it to be married?" Ice asked me.

"It's good," I replied, not really thinking of  where this conversation could head to.

"Hmmm...What do you do?" He continued, "In this marriage thing?"

"Well, we do things, together."

What 'things'? He asked.

"Things, you know, like watching movies, going shopping, attending weddings, funerals, those sort of things. Everything, actually." I said.

"Hmmm...Where do you fit in in this whole system of a marriage? What is your role in it?" Ice is a persistent bugger with a slightly disconcerting habit of preceding his sentences with a drawn out 'hmmm...' which makes an innocuous conversation between friends seem like a serious interview with the headmaster about the hole found in the girls' toilet window.

"I fit right in" I waded in, "You know, doing things, together, staying together, spending time together, taking care of the kids...What do you mean by the question 'Where do you fit in?'" I asked. It was a bit strange this 'Where do you fit in business.' No one had asked me earlier.

"As in if a marriage is a company, where do you fit in, what do you do? Are you the CEO or the CFO or the salesperson...what are you?"

Being married has given me a keen survival instinct. I realized instantly the import of this line of questioning. The fact that I could not readily provide an answer meant that in all probability this is a question that could pop up any time in the frequent debating exercises that are an integral part of every marriage. I needed a good answer.

Of course, it also told me that there was no immediate danger of Ice giving up his 'single' status.

I figured the easiest thing to do was to build upon the example of marriage as a business firm that Ice had suggested. I launched the quest for a definition by undertaking a primary research exercise. A census of all wives in households I had immediate access to yielded a dead end. "You would be fired in a month if this were a business firm" is a direct quote from the voice of client that was collected. Maybe a business firm would be too simplistic for an entity as complex as a marriage. Maybe I needed to consider a political system instead - after all systems of government have a lot more variety on offer. This brought me to a crucial question:

What system would a marriage most resemble?

Let's consider the major systems of government that we have nowadays. There is the Monarchy that has been quite popular in the history of mankind. Then we have republican democracy and finally a communist or an authoritarian dictatorship. These systems account for most of the prevailing or historical governments that the world has seen. How does marriage fit in?

I started with the process of elimination.

Traditionally, Monarchy was the most prevalent system of governance. The ruler had control over life and death within the kingdom.

My experience says that if a man likens his marriage to a Monarchy where he is the King-Emperor, it is safe to assume that either (a) he is not married or (b) he is drunk or (c) that he is both. It is equivalent to the husband using a bed sheet as a cape to entertain the children when the wife is away and actually believing himself to be superman:

"Look papa can lift up both of you together!" does not in any way translate into "No I don't care if you don't like the music system wires, I will not hide them."

Forget control over life and death, the most you can do it extend the time you spend in the loo by a couple of minutes. And even that feels like a major victory.

Monarchy, while a system of immense merit in this particular case is sadly not in existence. It has gone the way of the dinosaurs - giving rise to a lot of fantasy, but all that remains to be seen actually is a few ossified remains.

Next,  look at a Democratic Republic of Marriage. The canny student of political affairs would at once realize that there are two scenarios possible with our proposed DRM (Democratic Republic of Marriage). One, we can take this at face value that it really is a Democratic Republic. The second would be a real world scenario where a Democratic Republic is almost always an Authoritarian Dictatorship. These two systems account for most of the prevailing systems of government in the world today.

Unfortunately though, both systems do not pass muster for marriage.

Take Democracy for marriage: only two voters in a bi-party system, both with quite distinct agendas and only one with definite veto powers. You can well imagine what would happen in such a case - an impasse never to be broken till the husband gives in, three minutes later. Hence the case for marriage being a Democratic Republic is a weak one at best - although we'd do well to remember that in the real world the Democratic Republic of Marriage would most likely be an authoritarian dictatorship, which is our next case.

Marriage as an authoritarian dictatorship - popular opinion seems to suggest that we are getting warmer - still doesn't fit well enough. The first flaw in this argument is the freedom that one is allowed - for instance, you are reading this blog, published under my own name, without fear of reprisals. Freedom of speech or the lack of the same, most authorities agree is what is key to making a government an authoritarian dictatorship. Marriage fails this test. Mostly folks are free to say what they want as long as the instructions are followed, however grudgingly. Mere voicing of sentiment, done respectfully will not result in one being sent to the gulag of the living-room couch.

One system that I think seems to fit a marriage pretty well is that of a Constitutional Monarchy. I am, for all intents and purposes the Monarch of All I survey. I am installed for life. I require no special talents for the position. All I need to do is to follow the script, turn up on time and be able to drive and change light bulbs.

My wife is the popular Prime Minister. She runs the show. All decisions are taken in her office, including those concerning the foreign policy. My only duty is to agree with them, publicly and privately. It is an arrangement that works extremely satisfactorily.

I had finally found a way to explain the marriage scenario to an external, uninvolved party as well as an internal, very much involved party if (when) the need arose. I toasted the finding with a drink.

Author's note: The need arose a few days after this finding was uncovered. My wife gave me a simple answer to the question "What did I do in the marriage?" after she had herself asked me the same question in our last tete-a-tete. Apparently the correct answer is 'Nothing'.

The Hunt

At the dawn of humanity, man (and I use this term in the old fashioned way, referring to the species representing Homo sapiens rather than a specific gender) was a hunter. The spoils of the hunt fed the tribe and success was key to survival. The hunter needed to be good at picking up the spoor and staying with it till the kill was achieved. It was a science, what with beaters and drummers to flush the quarry out and the hunters to bring it down. Each bit needed to work precisely for success.

Modern times might have precluded the need for hunting to fill the stomach, but atavistic urges remain. These days, the quarry has been replaced by other targets and the 'kill' would be more of a 'win'. A key skill in the hunt, as I mentioned earlier, was following the trail of the quarry and managing the body of the hunt - the beaters - to get the game exactly where you wanted it.

The river of time and the sandpaper of need (or the lack of it) has eroded the ability to track the game, but the primal urges of managing a hunt remain. Where is the quarry? What places does it roam? What watering holes does it frequent? Where is it exactly, now? How do we get it into the open to get a clean shot? These questions still need to be answered for the new self-set targets.

The other day, it being a Saturday, my wife had forewarned me that she had to submit a project report on the coming Monday, so would need some time to finish work. In effect, she gave me explicit instructions to clear off, with our son so she could spend the morning working. Crystal clear instructions issued and understood with no slip between the cup and lip. So, of course, I took the shopping list, took the books to be returned to the library, raked my memory to bring up any suppressed 'to-do' things that had been buried there, found a couple and in this happy state set off with son in tow, whistling Man on the Moon (Tiger does a good chorus to it).

We reached the library and parked. My phone rang.

"Where are you?"

"In the car park."

"You haven't left yet?" she asked, incredulously.

I calmly pointed out that since the advent of the automobile, most cities tout the car park as a symbol of civilization and, in effect, there is more than one totem to progress erected in a city.

If she were within touching distance she would have strangled me. No audible threats to this effect were made, but I just knew.

"Ok, then which car park are you at?" She persisted.

"The one at the library."

"You haven't reached the library yet?" Unfortunately it is Scottie's day off and he couldn't beam me up there - I had to drive.

"Technically I am in the library compound."

"Let Tiger choose books."

"Of course Sweets." That's the purpose of bringing him to the Library.

Well, we went to the library where I let Tiger choose his books. He chose with gay abandon. He would potter over to the shelf (in the children's section the shelves are all just a metre high, so everything is well within his reach) and proclaim, "I want to read the green book!" He would proceed to pull out said book from the shelf, take it to the table, sit himself down and announce loudly to the whole room "TIGER IS READING A GREEN BOOK."

He'd then turn over all the pages, babbling to himself, till he reached the end whereupon, "THE BOOK IS FINISHED!" was announced to all and sundry, the book replaced in the shelf and a new one taken.

We had 'read' half a shelf of books and were just getting warmed up when my phone rang again.

"Would you pick up peanut butter as well please."

"Can you send me an SMS? So that I don't forget when I reach there."

"Honey, I'm working," she chided me gently. "It is just one thing. Put it in the cart now."

"I'm still at the library."

"Why are you still there? Is everything ok? Have you lost him?" She was panicking now.

"No, everything is fine. Tiger is choosing books" I put on my most soothing, 'I'm in control' voice.

"What are you doing there?" She sounded quite incredulous. She didn't seem to have heard the last part of my answer. I thought I had made it perfectly clear. "Tiger is choosing books."

She spoke slowly as if to a mentally deficient individual. "You have to help him choose, Honey. He chooses shelves not books if you let him. Do NOT spend more than 15 minutes there. And get him home for lunch. See you soon."

All the phone calls are checking the advance party and gently directing them to the target - the supermarket.

Shopping for my wife is like a hunt and this time she hunts vicariously. Me and Tiger are the beaters. It is our job to reach the correct place at the correct time in order for the whole process to work. She is the one who pulls the trigger. The fact that she is not physically present is immaterial.

Hmmm...they should now be at the Library, where the second floor has children's books. This is just an ordinary trawl, nothing spectacular yet, still must ask for pop-up books. Have a sip of water. Look at the way the sun is placed, the time to reach the supermarket is in another quarter of an hour. Move up the aisle and ambush the peanut butter - the one with chunky bits.

If the hunters and beaters deviate from the set path, the hunt can go astray. It is crucial to maintain the line of communication to ensure things proceed smoothly.

And she is not alone in doing this. I remember the good old days at Hogwash - once when Jags and I went to buy a watermelon since it was a particularly hot day and we felt like having one. We walked around, looking for fruit, doing market research on the Sunday street market. We spent an hour and had one watermelon to show for our labours by the time we landed back at the apartment. Neets, who had decided he did not want to step out in the heat and humidity for the melon, had directed the operations all the way.

"So where are you?"

Look out of the window - we stepped out of the apartment 90 seconds ago.

"Do you know how to choose? Try the fruit seller at the corner. If he has one - hold it up I can see it from the window and tell you if it is any good."

Sure. We beat a path around it under the cover of trees.

"I can't see you - did you reach the guy?"

Sorry - he was out of melons.

"Strange, I thought he had some - coming in I had seen some, I thought anyway. Now I guess you'll have to send a picture across to me."

I thought you chose melons from the sound they made.

"Yes, you can tap it and hold the phone next to it, but sometimes it can't be heard too well over the phone, especially if it is noisy there."

He has tried it earlier?!

Anyway. We got the melon. The hunt was successful.

Eating & Education

Generally, all men have stories from their younger days about the consumption of huge amounts of food, often involving hapless aunts and mothers, but the true eating story is one that has its roots in a hostel mess or dining hall. Anyone can eat copious amounts of home-cooked food. Doing something one likes is not exactly a task - if humans on the whole liked cleaning shit and wrestling with lions, we would have had the Twelve Cakewalks of Hercules instead of the Twelve Labours. Eating staggering amounts of food in a hostel is special for one particular reason: the food served there inhabited the area just onside of being edible with a hint of recognition thrown in - it looked familiar, but you couldn't quite put your finger on what it was. 

I remember when I was in the hostel, a roommate's elder brother, who was three years' our senior, held the eating record for the hostel. He had managed to consume, in one sitting, 25 of the hostel's chapatis. My roommate was possibly more proud of the record than his brother who had set it was. This record also became his goal to beat, something he managed to do a couple of years later, when he was a year younger than his brother and took the record up by a whole two points to 27. Mind you, having eaten that same food for five years, I appreciate how big those two additional points were. Anyway, he called his brother that evening to give him the good news. The record was in the family and pushed a bit further out of the reach of wannabe eaters.

I guess his brother was proud of him as well. I remember, the juniors in school were. They used to look up to him with awe, especially the newer ones who had yet to reconcile themselves to the food served in the hostel. More than once I heard snatches of conversations:

"Can you believe it! 27 of these...no wonder this place toughens you up..."


In college I was a part of a small group of like minded value-for-money eaters who went together to eating places, ate without care, above their weight class and did not sully the activity by taking petty bets - once in a while, yes, but not always and not with the members of the group. Since money had to go the furthest distance possible, we had a list of eating places corresponding to the funds at hand.
I can remember quite a few nights spent sleeping out on the institute lawns since it was physically impossible to climb the three flights of stairs that would take me to my room. People often thought that we were passed out drunk in the lawn. It wasn't the drink, it was the food. Eating copious amounts of food gives you a food coma: limbs don't function, vision becomes blurry, when people speak to you, you feel as if they are speaking from a place far-far away, movement becomes impossible or nearly so. All you can do is to sleep it off. I remember once a member of the eating crew, upon finishing the repast made the mistake of getting up immediately afterwards. He swooned and fell back onto his seat. We had a very anxious restaurant owner hovering about us asking if all was well. It was. We told him, the eating was good and that this 'fainting' was positive proof that the food was good. He smiled tentatively in the manner of a restaurateur who is unsure whether people fainting in his restaurant after overeating is good for business or not.

This was recreational eating. Serious eating was carried out in the confines of the dining hall. People took pride in the food served in their institutes. The idea was for the food to be as close as possible to the fine line that separates things that are edible from things that are not. The closer the fare served to this line, the more pride folks would have in it. Sample quotes from graduates of some well known schools in India:

"We used to get different pastel coloured food everyday. It tasted the same, exactly the same every day for four years."

"Our mess used to post the menu each day on the notice board. We asked them to post it after meals. We'd then take bets from everyone on what they ate."

"The adopted stray dog refused to eat the mutton."

"We once used a puri as a frisbee. It was smaller, but stung when you caught a fast one."

"We used to get greens every time the grass in the football field got mowed. I started tracking it in my second year of college. After a year, it had a correlation of one."

The key thing to note here is that all this was said with a reasonable amount of pride. Eating that stuff for a few years was supposed to get you ready for anything that life could throw at you. It was a reflection of the person you could be, how you could weather the storms of adversity. It was a reflection of the school you went to, how it readied you for life, how it would not waste time and effort on niceties like food and concentrate on getting you a true education. That a large percentage of students cut classes like crazy didn't matter. Putting up with that food alone would ensure you got a great education.

This brings us to the nub of the matter: Most people who have spent time in hostels (at least in India) seem to believe that there exists an inverse relationship between the quality of food served in the mess to the quality of education provided in the classroom.


You must have heard the old saying especially if you have read Asterix the Legionary "The stronger the army the worse the food. That's what keeps the men in a nasty mood."
Eating lots and lots of hostel food, that, as time goes by becomes worse and worse in our memories (Both quantity and quality appreciate and depreciate respectively with the passage of time) was considered a badge of courage, to be worn with pride and honour. Everyone of course wants to be perceived as 'strong' and food is what wins it for them - it needs to be consumed frequently, multiple times a day in fact, it is essential to one's survival - what better baptism by fire could one get?

Next time you are choosing a school, just eat at the mess. You'll know how good an education you would get.

Uhuru!

How far does a beard get you? Some days mine gets me as far as the living room couch from the bedroom.

I don't have a beard, usually. One of the primary reasons for it is the fact that I like sleeping on my own bed. My wife, you see, is from the anti-beard league.

She says if she wanted to marry a man with a beard, she would have found one. I remind her that she did - I was the proud possessor of a beard till about four days before the wedding, whereupon all sorts of lobbying was done, pressure exerted, diplomatic channels explored to get me to get rid of my goatee. My own mother and bride were the perpetrators, with cousins and even a four-year old niece playing supporting roles. Admittedly, I had grown my beard in the three weeks preceding the wedding, but it was for the express purpose of keeping it there for the big day.

I thought it made me look better, more mature; more bearded, as opposed to collared that some people end up looking like in family function photographs. It lent a bit of sang-froid to my demeanour. There was a little more respect. Except for from my wife. She resolutely stood in the way of all pursuits involving facial hair.

Initially I thought, like most women, she was jealous, for try as they might, getting a beard is beyond the capabilities of most ladies. Try as I might, I could never get her to give me a convincing reason for why I should not keep a beard.

"You look older. I didn't marry an old man" This was one of the reasons for keeping the thing in the first place, besides, I am an old man inside my head. 

"Don't you feel uncomfortable with a beard?" I think I can decide that on my own.

"Isn't it very humid to have a beard?" I don't think so - we have hair on our heads, among other places. Besides, growth thrives in humidity. Have you ever heard of a humid desert?

Or sometimes, it would just be a barefaced threat. "Remove the beard or you will sleep on the living room couch."

"Why don't you like my beard?" I asked her.

"Because if I wanted to marry a man with a beard, I would have done so." And we merrily wend our way through another iteration of that same argument.

That's not the only thing though. She wants me not to want a beard, willingly abandon it. Even if I have grown it. The chief logic there being along the lines of 'How can I possibly want it?'

The more I think of it, the more I am certain that it is much more than just a beard growing on my chin.

It is a question of sovereignty.

Men go into marriage thinking of friendship, companionship, sharing their lives and their space with another person, for fifteen minutes every day, following a standard five day week, allowing for the usual annual leave and sick days.

Women, it seems, get married as an act of colonialism: they want to share 27 hours a day, eight days a week. 'Sharing' of course is doing things the way 'she' wants them done. For men sharing means sitting on the same couch while 'he' watches TV. I think it is very useful. I call it 'Sharing with Space.'

So the question of my beard, I realized, was a question of sovereignty over my chin. Whether it had been annexed or not. I believed I held all rights to my chin, to do as I pleased, for hair to come and go by my pleasure. I was of course, wrong. My rights to my chin had lapsed.

I felt the need to exert some individuality - I quit shaving.

By the end of the week, the couch was my home, my son called me brother bear, my wife was carrying a placard saying "Jesus Lives" and each time my niece and nephew saw me, would chorus tonelessly "PJ Uncle please shave your beard!!"

I capitulated, going by the adage: He who runs away lives to see another day.

But my resolve lives on secretly. The rebels fled to the hills, but their loyalty to the cause remains. Skirmishes ensue.

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Recently I ran into a friend of mine - we hadn't met each other for months.

"Wife out of town?" He asked me?

"Yes," I replied.

"Must be a long trip." He said.

"How do you know?" I asked him, genuinely surprised.

"Takes at least two weeks to grow that kind of beard." He replied.

Getting Married

'It takes a village' is the title of a well-known, Grammy winning book by Ms. Hilary Clinton. I have not read the book, but from what I have read about it, the title actually refers to a proverb that goes along the lines "It takes a village to raise a child."

The same can also be said of getting married in India. It takes a village (or more) to get two people married to each other. Even if they are willing to get married to each other to begin with. 

One believes that getting-the-girl is the tough part and that after she finally says "Yes", the struggles are over. What one does not realize is that the troubles are only beginning. True, one could look at it stoically and believe that whatever it is, it will bound to have a happy ending with the launching of the happy couple into blissful matrimony. Of course it will. It mostly does get over. How much patience, sense, sociability and neurons you have left over is subject to debate.

I told my folks about the girl in question saying "Yes."

All hell broke loose.

The Date
I was on the phone with my mother when I told her and suddenly, preparations were in full swing: sounds of the house being re-painted and decorations and lights being hammered in started in the background.

The first thing my mother wanted to know was when should we fix a date. I was in favour of a long-ish engagement, say 12-18 months, before we started looking for a date. My Mother wanted to get it done the following week. After a few frantic phone calls to friends, relatives, astrologers, caterers and prospective venues, the wedding date was fixed for four months later. I was informed of this counter-offer since the following week seemed unacceptable to me.

I should have known a wedding happens on war footing. It requires lots of planning, organizing, inviting, arranging, ritualizing, hosting and a little bit of meditating, mediating, intrigue-ing and steering. Getting married the following week would have meant a five person wedding, which in hindsight, would have suited me just fine and would not have suited my family at all. Naturally, they declined to elucidate this particular point. As a negotiating point, four months was preferable to next week, so I agreed.

Hindu weddings take place on certain auspicious days, which for weddings cluster together about twice or thrice a year. After we had settled on a date, Ma let it slip that four months is the minimum time she needed to conduct a successful campaign. I needed more data to be successful at this marriage negotiation business.

Leave
Next came the question of duration of the marriage. Being slightly naive, I volunteered that I thought it was permanent, for life, as it were. Ma told me not be facetious. The question she wanted answered was for how many weeks would I be home in order to get married? How many days was I intending to take leave from work?

I was thinking in terms of a week rather than weeks. My cousin, Don, the self appointed consigliere to my mother had me know that the minimum acceptable or required was four weeks. Less than that and the implicit understanding was that the ceremony might not be completed.

I let him know that four weeks was impossible. It would be hard to explain to my company that I wanted to take a month off in three months' time. A mournful silence followed.

"What if you broke a leg or were medically unfit?" he asked.

"In that case, I would not be able to go to office."

"That can be arranged," he said.

We grew up together as kids, and had our odd fights and disagreements, but breaking my leg before my marriage was going a bit too far I thought. I told him it would look pretty bad if I had a broken leg and had to hobble around in my wedding.

He said that he was thinking more on lines of typhoid or jaundice. I thought it would hardly be a good advertisement for a wedding dinner. "Oh and by the way the groom has typhoid. Did you try the dessert?" And besides, I didn't think it possible to get married while inflicted with these diseases and I did not see how or why I should risk it anyway.

He said I was missing the point. He would have it arranged. I graciously declined the munificent offer.

We settled on 16 days, for that was the maximum period that would ensure I still had a job when I returned duly married. 

Invitations
Indian weddings are a spectacle. The chief item on display is the couple getting hitched. Convention dictates that all guests need to leave their mark, so their "Kilroy was here moment" is captured by getting a picture taken with the newly married couple. So as many pictures as there are invitees is the thumb rule. There are also smug, busybody, failed movie-director, pompous photographers to deal with.

"No Sir! This way, look this way, drop your shoulder...yes face her...madam please look up...into the distance, left hand here on her shoulder...both of you look into the sky...look up and yes...now once more...from this angle." And the perennial "Once more please" for anything that has just been done, like a smile, a handshake, an exchange of presents, a hug, an exchange of garlands...anything at all. Worst of all "Smile Please!" The 'Please' there is just to add a syllable. By no stretch of imagination is it a request. That is why weddings nowadays take so long - everything needs to be done twice for photographers.

I hate getting pictures taken and I hate being told to do stuff by pesky photographers. Yet, I could not get rid of this hazard in my wedding. The only way to reduce the suffering was to reduce the number of people invited.

My mother wanted to invite everyone she knew, or had ever known. About an equal number of people seemed to be on the initial invitation list from my Bride's side. All told, it seemed to be a significant percentage of the population of the country, since in India guests are not invited by person. They are invited by family. The family is an accepted extension of an individual at a wedding or any social occasion.

I came across some information that I thought might be useful to my cause - the state we lived in had a little known and less implemented law that stated marriage parties could not be more than 25 people. Unfortunately it turned out that the venue was about three inches on the wrong side of the state border.

All my efforts came to nought. I am left with a wedding album that runs into six volumes and weighs more than my three year old son does.


The Preparation
A general feeling of excitement masquerades as a part of the ceremonies months in advance. Actual ceremonies begin in the household only about a week before the day of the wedding. First, guests arrive en masse. People you know, people you don't, people you hope don't know you, people you get along with, people you don't get along with. All available space is taken up by mattresses. It becomes like a big camping exercise. To be fair even if it does make things a bit inconvenient (especially to folks used to the western concept of 'space'), it is a bit exciting.

Responsibilities are assigned on the basis of role (maternal uncle: clothes; sisters: tie the turban etc.) and skill (driving license: designated driver, pick up and drop guests, get stuff; sociable: drop off invitations etc.)

My bride-to-be had very conveniently switched sides on the matter of making the wedding a low-key affair and even declined my suggestion of elopement. She evidently likes to have her pictures taken.


The Clothes
Getting clothes is an event in itself. Apparently the thumb rule for wedding attire is that you have to buy something horribly expensive that you cannot hope to wear again in public in your life and you have to go to about seven places (for men) and seventeen places (for women) before you decide to buy something.  And you have to do all of this with a small entourage to help you. Everyone has an opinion. And five people do not have five opinions. They have thirty seven. My offer of buying a suit that would be useful later in life was deemed 'outlandish'.

In addition, my bride said she didn't feel I was too involved in the wedding, so I had to accompany her entourage with a small entourage of mine to look at what she proposed to wear. We criss-crossed the city in about three cars hopping between places, markets and colours. I learnt that there are infinitely more shades of red that there were all the colours in my ken.

I was getting desperate and my bride rejected another plea for elopement.

We did manage to buy something to wear. I wasn't sure what purpose it would serve for the rest of my life, but I was the proud (?) owner of a cream coloured sherwani. Clothing had finally been struck off the list.

The Ceremony
North Indian weddings are either held on sweltering hot days or on bitterly cold nights. And they have to last till pretty much when the Sun is getting ready to start the next day. This also has been the cause of dispute with my wife. Our wedding invitation asked people to be at a venue on the third day of February, while in fact we did not manage to get married till it was pretty much the fourth day. So technically, the third is the anniversary of our wedding invitation while the fourth is for the actual wedding. As history is written by the winners, the date she puts forward - the one on the invitation - stands.

The ceremony itself is clouded by the fact that one is hungry, thirsty, cold and uncomfortable (they made me take off my sweater and muffler on the flimsy grounds that no one wore them on a sherwani) with people milling about, eating and drinking, trying to pull your leg, getting pictures taken, and photographers asking you to smile. A few cousins and friends gamely try to keep you company but after a while the monotony and photographers manage to drive them off.

After a few hours of blinking-into-flashes later the actual ceremony began. From what little I have seen of Church weddings on screen, the activity taking the longest time seems to be the bride walking down the aisle. The actual wedding seems to get over really fast. We had nothing like it.

Our priest started at the beginning. Of everything. He worked his way from the big bang to the birth of civilization, counting along the way various miracles God had wrought, including among others, the various apocalyptic events that have shaken the earth. After what seemed like an eternity, he came to the householders duty-book and proceeded to take us through it word-by-word. Apparently there are separate chapters for husbands and wives. Once and only once I have completely agreed to each clause, to uphold my part in the marriage does the bride make an appearance, whereupon the process seems to start again, this time assuring her that I have agreed to do my bit.

Then we started on the exhaustive list of her duties.

Since the book was in Sanskrit, the priest would first say/read it out as is (no one understood), then do a live translation into Hindi and then to make sure we got the gist of it, illustrate it by an example or two.

Sitting cross-legged for such a long time, I couldn't feel my toes any longer.

I had heard of priests being open to "influence" and who had, upon receiving such influence, completed the ceremony in a tenth of the time, but our family priest was the sort of character to whom it was impossible to make such advances.

Finally after an age came the time when we were to go round the sacred fire and be pronounced married. I think the revolutions around the sacred fire was essential to normalize the blood flow in my legs. All we were to do now was to take everyone's blessings. Everyone meaning everyone brave enough to still be at the ceremony. Since both of us come from fairly large families it meant a further three quarters of an hour before we could finally be on our way, cold, aching and married.

The ceremonies started a week earlier. On the day itself, we left for the venue at seven in the evening and arrived back home at five in the morning. 

Addendum

The crude divorce rate in India (according to the page on Wikipedia) is 0.11 on 1000. It means that for every 100,000 people, 11 get divorced. This is an extremely low figure. To illustrate how low a figure it is, the same figures for a few other countries are: the United States 360; United Kingdom 280; Singapore 78; China 128; Russia 442; Australia 267; Germany 259; Japan 211. The only other country in the same vicinity is Sri Lanka with 15.

The extremely low rate of divorce coupled with the fact that India has 1.2 billion people, which is 412 million people more than all the countries listed above barring China is what makes it astonishing. All these people stay married or at least those that end up getting married, do stay married, mostly. 
The theory is no one wants to do it twice.

The Houseguest

I figured when my wife went off for a couple of weeks with our newborn son on a meet-greet-recuperate-gain-lose-weight visit home, I would be back to the joys of bachelorhood. The days would be cool and short. The evenings would be long and loud. I would renew acquaintance with sundry bar-tenders and sidewalks from whom domesticity had sundered me.

Needless to say, things did not quite materialize as I had visualized. The drinking buddies were married and settled. For them (too) it was no longer booze-bottle, pub crawls and occasional skirt, rather the milk-bottle, night-changes and occasional burp. The bar-tenders had new winos. The sidewalks were paved over, or had new squatters – teens whose folks ought to know what they are up to (Really! In my day, the youth showed a bit more restraint and a lot more responsibility).

My wife was off for three weeks. She left late on Thursday evening. Friday morning I jumped out of bed and headed to work, looking forward to a good evening ahead. By Friday afternoon when I had made a few phone calls, my spirits were dampened. Folks were busy - kids needed to go to piano or swimming lessons, bills needed to be paid, siestas needed to be taken...in short the folks I used to paint the town red with in my youth had plain run out of paint.

A fruitless weekend loomed large. Beaten, I rented movies. Friday morphed into Saturday and I had revisited such Buster Keaton classics as The General and Battling Butler, when I decided to look at the things-to-do list my wife had left behind. 

She is awesome! She had even catalogued it A through Z to make it easier for me. I started at the back - Washing, clothes as opposed to Washing, drapes and Washing, dishes (ongoing). I was eating off a newspaper so the third was off. I decided to chuck the list (for the time being).

The apartment we lived in came with a front-loading washing machine, on which was mounted a front-loading clothes drier. Both were fitted outside the kitchen in a small utility area, just across the refrigerator. As I walked over to the fridge to get a drink, I saw that the door of the drier (atop the washer) was ajar. I went to close it. I saw then that there was a pigeon in it.

The fellow was probably taking shelter from the storm. It had rained in the morning. "It was a pity the pigeon was there, Sweets," I imagined myself saying, "I thought I would wait for the pigeon to leave before doing the Washing, clothes. Unfortunately this also prevented me from doing the Iron, clothes as well." A likely story, fortunately true. I decided to do Eating, ice-cream and Watching, movies instead.

Sunday morning saw the bird firmly lodged in the same place. I decided I had to at least try to get it off the premises (Time was on my side - there were several days for me to make the apartment bird free). I put some rice on the ledge opposite the drier. This didn't tempt the dove. Some research was needed, since I wasn't too familiar with the culinary habits of pigeons. Maybe I had the wrong stuff. The wikipedia page on pigeons showed a photograph with the caption "Pigeons selectively eating wheat instead of rice grains." I had the wrong cereal. Wheat posed a slight problem. While we did consume wheat, it wasn't in the grain form. I tried cornflakes with no result. In fact he ignored all of the breakfast cereals I had at home except he gurgled a bit at fruit loops. Maybe this was it. I deposited a small pile of the coloured loops on the ledge and waited. The pigeon looked at me, cooed throatily and bobbed up and down. It seemed he wanted privacy to eat. I wanted him to eat with me present so I could close the door to the drier and evict him. I think he figured out this Machiavellian plan of mine since he waited where he was. Patience was his strong suit. Ten minutes of squatting on the kitchen floor peering from behind the door broke my resistance and I decided to go out for breakfast. When I returned that night after a particularly long repast involving three restaurants, two bookstores and one bar, the cereal had disappeared, the pigeon had not.

As I left for work next morning, I felt certain he would push off by evening (cars to re-decorate, friends to meet).

The next three days were a blur for me, what with meetings and planning and conference calls and eating out. Thursday night as I entered home, I remembered I had a houseguest. I went over to the drier with some trepidation. The pigeon was cooing contentedly inside. I wondered why it was called cooing. It seemed more like burbling. Maybe the pigeon and the Jabberwock were related.

The unwanted houseguest was still there. I needed to take care of it, before wife and child returned, lest I be accused of turning the apartment into a menagerie. I decided to give it one more day. The weekend was almost upon us. I'd take care of the dove infestation then.

Saturday morning came and I put my plan into action. I would do Washing, clothes, the drier was not needed in the washing part of the exercise and the washing machine made a hell of a racket and shook and really hard. It would be like staying on a bucking horse for our pigeon. He was sure to be scared off.

I loaded the machine and made myself scarce. I was sure in the ninety minutes it took for the washing machine to run the clothes through the customized obstacle course would be enough to get rid of the pigeon. I had nothing better to do at home, so I pushed off to have breakfast. I came back in a couple of hours. The house was silent. The machine had finished its program.

The bird was still there. Looking rather smug, I must admit. The only explanation I could think of was that it must have flown back in once the bucking washer stopped, and I had not been around to close the door to prevent it entering the drier again.

I hung out the washing to dry inside the apartment on the dining table, the chairs, the living room coffee table, the fridge. I had washed a big load because that is when the machine rocks the most. The apartment got a bit damp inside.

I had to get the infernal bird out. I needed another load of clothes. I stripped off all the bedsheets, clothes that needed to be aired (if they needed to be aired, they could be washed too, I checked off Air, winter clothes from the list), the drapes - anything in remote need of a wash.

I put in the second load for washing. I thought I saw the pigeon look a trifle alarmed. Must be like an earthquake for him. This time, I braved the damp, cold, hunger and other depredations to wait out the ninety minutes. The washing machine started humming, slowly gaining volume. The initial part of the cycles were more stop and start. It was at the end of eighty minutes that the real action started when the machine tried to get every last bit of moisture from the washed clothes by spinning madly. It rocked and jumped and hopped furiously making loud thumping noises. There was no sign of the pigeon. It retreated further inside. No one told the dumb bird that during an earthquake you should leave buildings and confined places.

I now had another massive washing load to dry with no place to dry it on.

I cleaned the kitchen counters and the window sills and the bay windows and draped all these newly created clean spaces with the washing. Basically any space I could find. By the evening I was pooped.

It was time to call in for external help. I called up Bur. He was an old pal of mine - we went to college together. He was a resourceful person. I met him for dinner and took him through the problem over a few drinks. He understood the gravity of the situation and said he would come over the following morning.

Bur came over on Sunday morning, all business-like and reviewed the situation. "Do you have beer?" I nodded. 

"Ok, lets get to work. I suggest we put the drier on - the heat and rotation will drive the pigeon out."

"What if it doesn't?" The last thing I wanted was to have to clean a dead bird out of the drier.

"It will. It's not stupid."

I reminded him that pigeons were the family of birds that gave us such stalwarts as the the Dodo.

He asked me to open a couple of beers to help him think. We had a couple of beers and after a while he announced grandly, "The pigeon problem has been solved!" We went out to take a look inside the drier. The problem hadn't been solved. Our friend had surreptitiously turned on the power to the drier. We discovered that the machine's safety mechanism did not allow it to be switched on while the door was open. Bur didn't take too kindly to failure.

I shot down his suggestion of closing the door and trying for roast pigeon. And if it works, you can market these as ovens - it is big enough to do a turkey in.

He clapped his hands and made hissing and shooing noises outside the drier. Apart from amusing the pigeon, they did nothing much.

"How about we get a cat?"

I told him that I when I said I did not want to remove a dead bird from the drier, I meant the statement to include not having to clean out feathers and blood as well, just in case he thought otherwise.

I think he got the drift. We had also run out of beer by this time, so Bur decided to push off. 

"I'll think about this and let you know," he added helpfully at the door.

I was on my own again. Me and the pigeon.

There were under two weeks left for my wife to return. And there there were a good six months remaining in the lease of the apartment. I had to get rid of the pigeon.

At office the next day I asked a colleague what to do for animal infestations. "What do you want to get rid of? Cockroaches?" I told her the animal in question was a bit bigger. "Rats?" She asked me. "Still bigger," I told her. She gave me the phone number of a company that got rid of monkeys. I decided I would feel pretty stupid calling them to remove a pigeon from the house and threw the number away.

That night, I thought desperate times call for desperate measures. I set an alarm for two in the morning. I selected Sweet Child of Mine as the song to shake the pigeon out of its slumber. If it didn't want to go the easy way, I would just need to make life a little less comfortable.

I managed to crawl out of bed by about a half past two carrying my music box. The darned bird was awake. I played Sweet Child of Mine on full volume in front of the it anyway. It bobbed in a manner that seemed to me to be keeping time to the music. I played some more loud music going from Pearl Jam to Metallica to Deep Purple. I even tried Louis Armstrong and his horn. I stopped when I was positive the pigeon was enjoying the songs. I couldn't sleep the rest of the night and consequently, getting through office the next day required immense doses of fortitude, a bad temper and caffeine.

Things did not get better when I found a letter from the building's management office asking me to explain the "Sustained loud music that was played from 2.35 am to 3.05 am". They also told me that this was a residential building (Sorry! I thought this was where the Rock DJ auditions were held) and that next time they would take a much stricter view of this. I bumbled through an apology mentioning 'short-circuit', 'electronic malfunction', 'won't happen again', 'very unfortunate', 'irresponsible machines' 'will get to bottom of this technology malfunction' etc. The lady at the office was kind enough not to press the matter. 

I had run out of options. Things got so bad that the next couple of days I caught myself making mewing sounds crawling under the drier hoping to scare the damn bird off.

I didn't know when it ate, if at all it did or if was some sort of mystical pigeon that survived only on the karmic forces flowing through the earth for it never seemed to step out of the drier.

By the time the last weekend before wife returned rolled by, I was ready to have a drink with the pigeon. I took my beer to the utility area. I talked to the pigeon and told him in no uncertain terms, that while his stay had been most enjoyable, there comes a time when to maintain friendship you have to ensure that boundaries are maintained. I think he understood.

The next day I came back from work to find him on the ledge opposite the drier. I made no sudden movements. I curbed the instinct to rush outside and slam the drier door shut. I just went to the fridge and got a beer and had another chat with the pigeon. After my next beer I even got him some fruit loops (he didn't have any though).

The next day, he left. The drier was empty.

I went through the events in my head. I now had all the possible washing done, including clothes and drapes. I had cleaned almost every visible area of the house to dry the clothes on, had managed to get rid of most of the beer and old cereal, had even aired clothes (okay, washed 'em too) and reorganized the cabinets looking for stuff to entice the pigeon. It seemed to me the pigeon was in league with my wife to get me to work. It was fortunate the beer diplomacy worked. One man to another, the pigeon understood the perils of being a husband. Only the other day I found it puffing, cooing and stamping in front of a very disinterested female pigeon. I can only wish him the best.

As for the remainder of the list my wife left for me to do: I went through the rest of the apartment to make sure there were no other lurking creatures to make me work.

The Bill Run

I sprinted down the road as fast as my busted knees would allow me to. I was winded. I had been running for ten minutes. I checked my watch - 12 minutes to go to H-hour. Couldn't afford to stop, I had just a couple of hundred yards to go. I jogged, wending my way through the parked cars and turned round the corner. Luckily, there was no one there. I inserted my card in the machine and started paying the bills. With three minutes to midnight, I printed the receipt. All well till next month, when I would need to undertake the bill-run again.

When I got home, my wife was waiting.

"Where did you go?"

"Couldn't sleep. Went for a walk." Not a complete lie. I could not sleep, technically, since the time I woke up with a start, realizing there were bills to be paid and that I had about half an hour to pay them in, before fines kicked in. I stuffed the bills into my pocket, wore my shoes and sneaked out. I was hoping she'd be still be asleep by the time I returned. That way she'd never know of the last-minute payments. 

This bill payment is a bone of contention between us.

We have two types of bills to be paid: Those that can be paid online, requiring me to be at an internet connection with bank login devices handy before midnight on certain dates and those that need me to hare down to a machine with the deadline fast approaching.

For some undefined reason, I cannot pay bills in advance. I have tried, and I have failed. A number of times.

It just doesn't feel right to pay the money when it doesn't need to be paid for another two weeks. Or ten days. Or seven days. Or three days. Or till tomorrow.

I feel the temporal gap between me receiving the bill and the last day for payment written in it as such a vast chasm as to be unbridgeable by the mere passing of time. I can't put the reason why I do not want to pay the credit card company or the gas company say, two days in advance.

It is definitely not the interest I earn with the bank. The princely rate that my bank pays me, compounded by the relative penury of my account deems this monthly addition to my savings to be equal to an amount, more or less, that if I were to convert to specie, I would require about half a minute's worth of work with sandpaper on a coin of any denomination. And then save the shavings, not the remnants of the coin.

Is it pride in the fact that I remember these deadlines (self-created issues, as my in-house therapist calls them)? Maybe.

Do I like being jolted awake to remember looming last dates (with me it almost always boils  down to last hours and minutes) and then undertaking a sprint? Not really.

Occasionally I miss the cushion and hit the hard ground. There have been a number of reasons for that - such as the machine would not work (that one time I did not leave enough time to go to another machine), the website was under maintenance (can you believe it! that too in this day and age), the internet connection was down (these last two should actually be accepted for a deadline extension), there was a queue at the machine (three morons who could not manage their time better).
Only twice was I forced to admit that I had forgotten.

In the past my in-house therapist used to have a fit then and still does occasionally, but time and tide have mellowed her. She knows I hate all forms of exercise so if I am leaving the home and giving evasive answers, it must be a bill that needs paying.

Each time after dinner I busily and in as low key manner as possible open my laptop or wear my keds and try and push off, my wife wants to know if I am paying bills.

I nod.
Next she wants to know why I don't pay them when they come in or since I am perfectly aware of when the bills come in, why don't I set a date for paying them and make my life easier.

I nod again. This time to acknowledge the truth in the statement.

All this makes sense. Her suggestions are eminently sensible and sustainable and that is why she got to be the in-house therapist that I needed most in my life.

But it is not implementable.

I do not know why it is so.

I have tried - I once sat down a week early to pay bills. I opened my laptop and went to the web. Next thing I know the deadline was a few hours away and I was collecting pieces of paper and logging in to the bank's website.

I paid the bills that time and then I called for help to find the lost memories of the intervening six days.

I lay down on the couch. I tried to remember what had happened - at first the memories were sketchy - but my therapist is good.

Yes, a cricket game was on. I had missed most of the match but had to catch up on what happened.

No, I did not watch the highlights - I read the ball-by-ball commentary on cricinfo to get a quick view of what happened - 90 overs with comments, plays, scorecard, statistics analysis and other news, via of course, the quick check of scorecard links of past matches somehow connected to this one that are liberally sprinkled in the commentary.

Then I went to the news sites - figured out what was happening in the world in general, beyond the cricket ground.

Then I checked my e-mail and office e-mail. I wrote some replies and finally added half a cent's worth of stuff to my blog.

By this time the day was over. It was time to catch the highlights on TV and then to sleep - the peaceful sleep of one who had achieved something - I had managed to read the commentary of an entire day's play and had even managed to re-play the key moments of the test in my head.

The bills were forgotten.

They had lost the age-old battle between the important and the urgent.

This same went on for the next six days: office during the day, 'randomizer initializing' at night, till forsaking the mantle of 'important' that the bills habitually wore, they became at once, URGENT.

And then I paid them.

Getting a massage

When we went to Phuket, one of the joys that my wife primed me to look forward to was getting a Thai massage. Apparently it is therapeutic, does wonders for your body and soul and best of all, in Phuket off season, it is to say the least, cheap: for the equivalent of six dollars, you can get someone to try re-align your musco-skeletal structure for an hour.

We were staying at a little-known hotel on one of the lesser known beaches, during the definite non-tourist season of Phuket. Thanks to my early training in Economics, I realized that the weather, on an average, was very good - it would rain one day and be blazing hot and humid the next. Actually to be fair, for two of the five days, it was actually pleasant for major parts of the day with the threat of rain, a pleasant breeze and no sun.

There was a small place right across the small street from our hotel called 'Leelawadi Thai Massage'. It was a room about thirty feet long and fifteen wide, with a bathroom at the far left corner. Inside, along the wall on one side of the room were five chairs that would recline a fair bit and where one could get a foot massage and along the other side were five beds separated by pull around curtains - the sort you have around hospital beds which make the beds sort of private, except these were in a rather cheerful print.

There were three ladies in the massage place and they followed a pattern of communication similar to the one followed in most places in the small enclave we were staying in: one member of the establishment communicated with all customers. Any questions directed to any other individual representing the establishment were directed to this individual to answer. This was the policy followed by the hotel we stayed in, the restaurants we ate in, the tour operator we booked with and also this massage establishment. Initially I thought it was due to possibly fewer English speaking people. This theory of mine was disproved at the hotel at which we were staying, once when the regular question taker was missing, the deputy effortlessly stepped into the breach.

My wife, who is the family expert on the subject of spas and massages, tried the place first and recommended a Thai massage.
You'll come back wonderfully relaxed and all your joints will be loose and free.

"Hard or medium?" The lady there asked me upon hearing my request.

"Hard." More value for money was the thought that prompted this reply.

The lady asking the question got up with a weary smile. She was short and stocky - like the Tommy stout who pulled the cat out of the well - and she looked strong, a bit like a professional wrestler.

She gave me a pair of shorts to change into and directed me to lie down on one of the beds.

She started with the legs. The only communication she did from now on were a series of clucks in varying pitches.

One thing was evident. She did not like the way God had screwed my legs in. She tried to solve the problem by wrenching my left leg out at the hip.

God might not have screwed it in right, but He had screwed it in tight. Still, I couldn't fault her for effort.

A few cracks and creaks later she started on the other leg. It was a beginning, though her clucks were far from happy. I mentally thanked God for good handiwork. If she had her way she would retain one or both of my legs for a day or two for maintenance.

She gave me five seconds to breathe and did a light jig on my legs. Since the wrenching was not wholly successful, she tried re-screwing them. I came to the realization that had I crossed her path early in life, career avenues in the contortionist line might have been open to me:

PJ the Fluid Wonder - Pack him in a box, pour him in a glass.

The activity thus far was apparently just the warm up (for her) and stretching (for me). Next she proceeded to unleash the full fury of her talent on me.

She put me in a figure-four leglock. I always thought that 90% of the professional wrestling shown on TV was play-acting. Not true. I hung in there, biting my lip and resisting the urge to tap out. After three seconds I gave in and tapped the bed once, twice, thrice.

She chuckled. Apparently in a massage one cannot tap out.

Her signature move was the drop-elbow slam. I couldn't actually see if she climbed up anywhere, but I did get a few elbows in my back. She was pretty accurate. She hit a sore spot every time. The series of well directed slams was followed by another jig on my back. No, this time I think it was a reel. She then tried to figure out if my ribcage could serve as a possible diving board. A few disappointed clucks later she got off.

Now it was back and arm time.

She went in for another submission move - a variant of the backbreaker - pulling both my arms out behind me with her knee to my back. There was a small fusillade from my back and I think I gained an inch or two in height.

"You paining?" She asked me. I was glad for the communication to finally move into a realm I readily understood from the Morse code of clicks and clucks she had been so intent on pursuing previously.

"Y e s." I managed to croak.

"No Pain. No Gain." She told me rather smugly.

She was carrying on the good work that the Inquisitors had started in the fifteenth century, only this time I had no idea what I needed to repent for.

It was simple. If there was a joint, she cracked it. If it didn't crack, she worked it till it buggered well did crack. The only joints saved from this treatment were my cranial sutures.

When it came to my neck, I said my prayers and prepared to meet my maker. There was only one way this ended and I had seen it innumerable times in Bruce Lee movies. She followed exactly the same technique (with, of course, the EEEEIIYYAAAAH replaced by a cluck) and elicited the same series of fatal cracks.


But I was still aware of my surroundings.

I pinched my arm.


And alive.

I wiggled my toes.


And still had use of legs.

I was unscathed.

I had walked the bridge to the other side and come back to tell the tale.

This apparently was the finale. She let me go. I gratefully paid the money and made a quick getaway lest she forget that she hadn't demonstrated the sharpshooter or the piledriver or a drop-kick.

And yes, it did make me limber. For the next couple of days, I could scratch all the way down from my shoulder blade to the small of my back in one fluid motion.

Rambabu ke Parathe

My first job had taken me to Indore, a city of about 1.5 million people, slightly to the left of the middle of India. Even though Wikipedia lists it as the 147th largest city in the world, Indore behaved like a small town - the people were very polite, nice, helpful and friendly, the streets were crowded, but the people were patient. People talked to each other and smiled.

Indore is famous, among other things for its food. This is an anecdote about one of these excellent eating places that dot the city.

Whiling away our time after office one day, me and NP chanced upon a new eating place that had opened close to our office. It was called Rambabu ke Parathe. Both of us liked parathe and so we decided to dine there the following afternoon. The place seemed nice, the smells were good and above all, in contrast to most places that we generally ate in where the menu followed an ancient oral tradition, passed down through generations of waiters, this place had a printed, laminated multi-page booklet listing the fare.

By force of habit, I have to read the complete menu of any restaurant I go to, and this one was a rather interesting menu for in addition to giving a list of the food available and prices charged, the menu also had a short history of the restaurant, how it started, who Rambabu was, how it got famous in Agra a long while ago and how they came to be in Indore and so on.

While reading through the menu, each of us made a significant discovery. NP went to the nub of the matter as he usually did: the price of one paratha was the princely sum of Rs. 35. This amount would usually buy a complete meal at the other places we ate at. It was, in foreign currency equivalence, about 20% lesser than the number of cents required to make a full US Dollar, but was still a good amount of money in those days. NP beckoned the waiter.

"Why is this so expensive." he asked, getting to the root of the matter.

"Sir, these are special and good." The waiter said.

"Which waiter says his food is lousy and expensive?" NP countered. His logic, it must be said, was impeccable.

"No, sir, the parathas are really good. Once you try, you will agree as well."

"What's so special?" NP generally had fun conducting such inquisitions.

"Well, you just have to try them to know. I can guarantee that you will like them." The waiter had apparently been coached not to sway from the "try it and know it" line.

"Will you give me money back if I don't like them?"

In the meantime, I hit paydirt - or what I thought was paydirt. There, in black and white, was stated in the menu that "If a patron ate three parathas, the patron would not have to pay for the meal."

This was outrageous! It was the stuff dream are made of. I showed this statement to NP. He was immediately suspicious. He was of the opinion that the parathas would be terribly large, else the place would be out of business soon.

"How big are the parathas?" he asked our friend the waiter.

"Normal size sir."

"What is normal size? My friend who is six foot four can hold three cricket balls in his hand. For him that is normal. What is normal for a paratha here?"

He indicated that the order for the table next to ours was ready. We could see what was the normal size of the paratha when it was brought in. That seemed fine.
Well, the parathas were a tad above normal, say about seven inches in diameter. There were some vegetables in the plate along with some curd and salad.

"How much for the rest of the stuff in the plate?" asked NP.

"That's all free and unlimited."

NP thought the owner was slightly stupid. This seemed like a an opportunity for arbitrage that was not long for this world. Already both of us were making plans in our head to eat here everyday, thrice a day - to squeeze in as many meals as we could before the place went out of business or changed the rules.

I proposed that we order three each and be done with it. NP was of the opinion that we should declare our intention of eating three each but order them one by one so we got them hot. This seemed to be the logical thing to do, so this is what we did. The waiter said it would take ten minutes to get our first order. To kill time, we ordered a phirni (dessert) each and if it was anything to go by, the parathas would be worth the wait. 

Finally, in what seemed to be one of the longest ten minutes of my life till then, we got the first couple: the paratha was deep fried, resting in a small pool of ghee, very crisp, golden brown with deep brown patches, crisp flakes coming off on the top, steaming hot and smelled delicious. The first two had a cauliflower filling.

We started eating in earnest. For the next five minutes there was no conversation. We were keeping pace with each other. We had decided that we would order the next one halfway through the first so we didn't have to wait. This we duly did now. About three quarters of the way through the paratha, I realized, I was slowing down.

"Should have skipped the dessert," I thought.

I looked up and NP was giving voice to what I had just thought. "Should have kept the phirni for the end."

We were nearly through with the first one when the second lot came in. It was as pleasing to the senses as the first, but we were rapidly running out steam.

Of the two new ones, we split the first one between us and laboured through it.

Shamefully, we had to get the fourth one packed. Needless to say, we had no desserts after the meal.

The parathas were heavy. They just sank right to bottom of your stomach. Both of us were left in a food induced coma that took the better part of the afternoon to come out of. We paid the bill and kept sitting at the table for a quarter of an hour before being able to summon the will to move.

That night we met at my place to do a dissection of what went wrong: Why did we end up paying for food in a place that offered a chance to eat good food for free? These were just parathas. Extraordinary in taste, but not size. We figured:

1. Dessert immediately before was a bad idea

2. We had a late breakfast, so were not really hungry

3. Ate too much of the freebies on the plate - should focus on the parathas that we are paying for and not the free curds

4. Ban all liquids from the table - we drank nearly two glasses of water each during the meal - it all comes down to space.

Now it had become an issue of our honour. We had set out to eat three and we had failed. Next weekend we decided to plan a proper campaign. We skipped dinner. We drank lots of water to get water in the bloodstream and ensure we were well-hydrated and didn't feel thirsty while eating. This way water would not take up valuable stomach-space. The place apparently opened at eight. We landed there at a quarter past, shunned the desserts and placed our order, again, one paratha each to start with.

To cut a long story short, we both reached within a couple of bites of finishing two parathas each. We were spared the shame of having to get food that we had ordered but couldn't eat, packed, but we still ended up paying for what we ate.

The next two weeks brought two more tries with modifications of the same strategy, but we could never better our mark of eating almost two each. Four weeks into the whole thing and we had to admit that we were beaten, well and truly. We had to pay for every meal we had there. We needed to recoup our losses.

This was when NP's brilliance came to the fore. Rambabu ke Parathe, despite the excellent food and the offer of free eating remained little known. We got an old schoolmate of NP's over for dinner at the place. He was a smug sort of person who got along very well with himself but not very well with practically everyone else and who took pride in eating. 


A bet was made - If you eat three, we pay, else you pay for us.

Thrice we managed to get a free meal using this strategy, not bad for three attempts.

On the Rationalization of Clothes

They say when the universe was born and started expanding, it created it's own space and time.

So when my wife says "I shouldn't be buying more clothes, there's no place to keep them. You need to help me rationalize them," she is calling me to work on the space-time continuum. Create more space so she can have more time to shop. I have no choice but to try.

There are three philosophies for rationalizing clothes prevalent in our home.

One is mine. There are two sorts of clothes - those that you wear to office and those that you do not. Everything else is bunk.

Then there is my son's: There are clothes depicting modes of transport and these are the ones you wear. Every other item of clothing is not for wearing, but just to ensure accessibility to the above; that parents, friends and relatives have, hoping against hope, spent money buying this latter category is neither here nor there.

Last, is the method my wife follows: " ", " , ? . !" " , ; , ."

We begin the rationalization.

To set the initial criteria for selection, I suggest she discard everything that has not been used in the past six months. She agrees in principle or says something to that effect. We start. The plan is that she'd pull out clothes and we'll make two piles, 'yes' (keep) and 'no' (discard). It should be simple. She starts. First up is a white shirt. I ask her when she last wore it.

"I wore it to the meeting when we met the client for the initial briefing at the client's office after we won the project. We went for drinks later, remember you picked me up after the meeting? I think it looks good, though since it is white, I can't wear it too often, since white shirts, after a period just die. I remember Q in my office has a similar shirt though the colour is different." A keen observer might notice, that there is no mention of any temporal data that might lead us to infer whether the said meeting was in the past six months or no.

"Let me see if it still fits as well." She tries said shirt on. "What do you think?" I said it looked fine.

"Fine, not good?"

"No, good."

"No-good?"

"No, it looks good."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I am sure."

"Ok, so lets keep it."

I backpedaled a bit and reminded her that the criteria in question was whether she had worn it in the past six months. She said she just told me she wore it at the client meeting, plus the question is irrelevant considering we had just decided that it looked good.

I bring the fact up that I am not updated with her client meeting calendar. She tells me that given the time I spend on her laptop I should know her meeting calendar.

Finally, she does tell me the meeting happened three months ago.

"Ok," I said, "That's an automatic yes then."

Half an hour later we had gone through three more shirts. It was a Saturday afternoon. I had to get to office on Monday. We needed to speed things up. I asked her to change places with me. I would take clothes out of the cupboard and she would tell me which criterion they came under.

I held up a shirt.

"I bought it with you, remember, the evening before we were to leave for our vacation and we went out to dinner and there was this moving-out sale on?"

I was at my dogged best "Yes or no?"

"Yes," she said. We made great progress and had cleared two whole shelves when I realized that the pile of 'yes-es' seriously outweighed the pile of 'no-s'. To elaborate, there was nothing in the 'no' pile. I thought it warranted a quick check of our criteria.

"What are you saying 'Yes' for?"

"'Yes' means I want to keep it."

I patiently explained to her that the purpose of culling was to get rid of stuff. We had to harden our hearts and take tough decisions. It then transpired that she did not agree with the criteria of disposing of something with six months of disuse. Six months is apparently the fallow period for clothes. So we tried other time based criteria. There were drawbacks to them - six months was definitely too short. A year was not long enough either since seasons change. Three years wasn't enough since styles often came back. We settled on a decade.

She had a pair of jeans she last wore in college that was put in the discard pile. Actually it made up the discard pile. I told her she could buy an equivalent mass of clothing as that pair of jeans if she wanted to maintain the space she had.

A fresh start was needed. We decided to approach the problem from a new angle. I told her my philosophy on segmenting clothes: There were office clothes and non-office clothes and all other clothes one got rid of.

She warmed to this criteria - she called it the 'purpose-based' segmentation of attire. So she would make a few buckets based on when or how she used the clothes. If they did not fall into any of the pre-designated criteria, no matter how much we liked them, they would need to go.

We started again. I asked her what her criteria would be. She said she liked what I said - she would go with office clothes and other clothes.

I picked up a white shirt.

"Office" she said.

Another shirt.

"Client meetings."

"Is that office or no?"

"What do you think?"

I told her I was just making sure. "Why can't you just say office instead?"

"Because I won't wear it if I am only going to office." Well that was pretty clear now.

I picked up another piece of clothing.

"Going out shopping."

I reminded her that this last criterion was not on her original list of criteria.

"Yes," She said. "I can't have only two criteria. What do you do when you have to go out?"

I said I wore non-office clothes.

"What do you wear when you go out to meet friends?"

The same.

"What about when we go out shopping?"

Ditto.

"And when we go to a picnic?"

Yep. That too.

"And if it is a sit down dinner?"

"You mean a place with a tablecloth?"

"Yes"

"I might not wear keds."

She adopted the long-suffering martyred look common to women accustomed to dealing with imbecility on a regular basis.

"All these things are different." She managed to say. And that sounded the death knell of the 'rationalization process' we had adopted.

Apparently, "Office clothes" is a kingdom with myriad species inhabiting it. There are clothes to be worn to office on days with no meetings. Then there are clothes that are worn for meetings with colleagues and bosses, different ones for bosses' bosses and clients.

Same for going out. Taking our son to the playground downstairs involves apparel that is separate from the outfit worn while taking him for a picnic by the beach and still different if the playground happens to be in a mall. The garments for eating at a restaurant without a tablecloth are as different from the finery used for eating in a restaurant with a tablecloth as chalk and cheese.

Plus then there is portion of the wardrobe that one might never wear, but needs to have, primarily because.

The bed was now full of little piles, each with only a smattering of clothes. I had forgotten which pile was which. The only pile I was sure of was the one to discard. It still had the pair of her jeans from college.