Is this real life?

If I were writing a novel based on my pregnancy so far, any sane editor would tell me not to have quite so much going on - it just isn't realistic.

First, I quit my job, and travelled around for four months - I was pregnant for three of them. Then, my husband quit his job because he wanted to start his own company. His grandmother died before we could tell her we were having a baby. We moved back to India, and are trying to get used to it all. My mother fell sick and had to be operated on. And lately, it seems like my in-laws are determined to have us stay with them until the baby's born - an idea that really doesn't fit in with our plans.

Yesterday, A discovered why they were pushing so hard. It turns out my mum's surgery had been more serious than they'd let on. My family and my in-laws had decided it was best not to worry us with the news - they had to remove a couple of her toes. 

They only told A yesterday, after she was well out of any danger. He tells me she's okay now. But how is losing two toes okay, really? Objectively, I know it's better than losing her entire foot. She can still walk, and she assures me that she's not in any pain. In fact, she's characteristically cheerful about it all. 

But she turned sixty this month. She still has a good thirty to forty years of healthy living in her. It's heartbreaking to think that she won't be able to run around as I'm used to seeing her doing. It's such an integral part of her personality.

For the most part, I'm okay. She is, so how could I not be? But I think of her playing 'ten little fingers' with my niece. I think of a wedding photo where my dad slid on her toe ring. I think of morning walks on the beach, and treks through bazaars doing ardent shopping. And I mourn those toes, despite never having spared them too much thought before this. 

On another note, much as I disagree with the families' decision to keep the surgery's outcome from me, I'm touched by how protective everyone is, and how eager to see that I'm taken care of. Despite it all, because of it, I'm reminded again how lucky I am.

Angrez chale gaye...

R,

Pro travel tip - fly on a Tuesday night and you'll have a near-empty flight. I'd three free seats to my right (with an aisle), and one free to my left. Oho. So great. I sat down comfortably and watched ten movies back to back, only occasionally interrupted by a screaming baby. Every flight has at least one, even the ones that leave on a Tuesday night.

Here's the weird thing - I didn't hear a single Indian parent on the flight talk to their kid in any language other than English. How did that happen? I get that the kid lives in Canada/Britain since it was a Toronto-London flight, but can English really be the language you talk to them and your spouse in ALL the time? It's kind of depressing, and all kinds of limiting. English doesn't have plum descriptions like 'tu baingain hai ki anda hai re' or 'podaaaanga' or 'plum,' for that matter. How can you ever fully express yourself?

It just feels like you'd instinctively respond in your mother tongue when surprised/angry... like in that Birbal story where the priest who speaks 14 languages with the fluency of a native screams out in Telugu when woken suddenly in the night with thorns (it may have been a Tenali Raman story, and it may have been some other language, but the point's the same)... but nope, even when a kid threw his spoon of food at his mum, she just said, "We don't do that, sweetie." 

!!!

Whaaaaat?

She didn't say it with the distinctive twang of someone who'd grown up abroad either. Is it just more socially acceptable to talk English in public, especially when you're outside India? Should that even matter one way or the other? 

I worry that could be us - not because we don't speak our mother tongues without caring who's listening, but because we have different native languages. Maybe I'll talk to our kid in Tamil, and you can talk to him in Kannada, and we'll both toss in some Hindi and some Telugu and a bucketload of English. It may confuse the poor thing (especially given my Telugu sucks), but I think it'd be preferable to only speaking English.

A.

Outside the Box

R,

Well, this is it. I leave tonight. We were laughing over our friends’ reactions to the news about my solo Europe trip, and you said, “To be fair, we were equally thrown when we first heard about P & S getting married but living in different cities.”

I sputtered an indignant, “Bu-wuh-nu-no! That’s completely different! This is for four weeks,” but, of course, you're right.

We say we’ve moved past the racial and religious prejudices of our parents’ generation, but we’re just as judgmental about things that don’t fit cookie-cutter molds of expected behavior. 

Over the last couple of years, there’ve been more instances of people pushing the boundaries and daring to do what they felt was right from them. P & S deciding their careers were in a great place and neither should compromise and move until they’d an equivalent offer in the city where the other person was.  J & D deciding to immigrate to Oz after a vacation there because they fell in love with the place – and willing to go there without a job to make it work. O saying she wanted to quit her job of seven years and do nothing for a while. 

 These, and others, are accounts which we hear and are tempted to raise a skeptical eyebrow at. We mouth the p.c. lines about how liberating it sounds, and how we’re so happy they’re happy, all the while thinking, “Wow, better you than me.”

We’re a patronizing lot. What does anyone standing outside know about where people are coming from, or what will happen in their lives? Yes, T & K were in a ‘long distance marriage,’ and she cheated on him; and E had to come back from the US penniless after four years looking for a job to no avail. But not all lives follow the same patterns, and everyone has a right to take the path that they think is right for them at the time. 

With not a little shame, I’ve resolved to try harder not to accept unconventional choices condescendingly, and to respect the fact that the people making these choices deserve the same respect that I’m due when I make my decisions.

-A.

Money Matters

R,

Fact: you’ve always made more money than me (you risked a pricey business degree, so you deserve the extra $$’s you retain after paying off the hefty loan).

Fact: It doesn’t bother me – it isn’t even something I think about.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say. We’re not getting a divorce, so the ugly battles of rights over money doesn’t come up. We don’t have joint assets, since we use up our money on travel rather than houses or cars. You’re older than me, you’ve more work experience, you’ve the fancy degree. I’d have something to think about if you weren’t earning more than me. 

What if the situation was reversed? You’ve always talked about starting something of your own. If you did, I’d be the primary breadwinner for a bit. I can’t imagine it changing the equation between us, but you never know. I’m inherently frugal, would I become a shrew? You’re ambitious, impatient, and believe in living life to the fullest – would you resent me? 

Money comes up in Indian marriages in so many ways, even assuming dowry is actually illegal and doesn’t enter the picture. From the suitor looking for working women (progressive!) with salaries less than his, to the parents who are suddenly reluctant to ask their daughter for anything despite having to take out loans for her wedding, and despite her giving them a portion of her salary in the past. The housewife who gets a monthly allowance, the question of joint bank accounts and who contributes what percentage of money to it. The possibilities for miscommunication are endless, especially given no one likes to talk about money.

I read somewhere that it’s the leading cause of marital disputes. It’s easy to imagine. 

-A.

Gold Standards

R,

Single TamBrahm girls are meant to always wear a gold chain, with a matching pair of bangles and earrings. Once they get married, the chain is replaced with a thali/mangalsutra and toe rings are added to the ‘must-wear’ list. Oddly enough, though a finger ring is presented at the marriage, this isn’t mandated daily wear… most practical when you consider the amount of food consumed by hand.

I’m sure these traditions are well-intentioned, and probably originated in a desire to give a girl a financial security net in the days before women had out-of-home careers (cue weepy movie sequences where women are seen selling away every last bit of gold).

Maybe there was a moral code of decency in the olden days, where stealing a woman’s marriage gold was equivalent to raping her in a temple. I doubt such qualms are felt any more. Which begs the questions - Aren’t you just asking to be robbed, going about in real gold? Is it feasible to be trotting about your body weight in gold in India’s blazing heat?

There’s nothing practical about our society’s attachment to the metal, especially to the sacred mangalsutra. Yes, it can hold safety pins very efficiently, but it’s a clunky huge chain that matches very few outfits worn in 2014. I started looking for it in pictures shared on social media and realized no one I know is photographed wearing one, other than at the wedding.

What are the new definitions of morality then? Is the decent thing  to wear it to religious and social functions, or to any occasion where you may run into a conservative relative, so that they can keep up their illusions about what married women should and should not wear? Or should you have the guts to disown it completely, and say so to those who enquire?

I don’t really have an answer, but I suspect we may be one of the last few Indian generations who’ll struggle with this. I can’t see us being too fussed if our children swear off gold altogether, and use the money saved on other things.

-A.

YOLO in NOLA

R,

We really only have two shared interests -  we love each other, and travel. When I stop to think about it, it's kind of scary how little we have in common... but I don't usually get the time to think about it, because we're either travelling, just back from a vacation, or planning our next one :)

Last night, we got back from our engagementiversary/valentine's week celebrations at New Orleans. Who knew a city in North America could be so charming? An All Saints game + Mardi Gras parade on Saturday night showcased Bourbon Street at its eccentric best - you could totally imagine it was still the 1920's and the Jazz Age had never ended. 

I don't want to glorify alcohol, but it fueled some incredibly beautiful scenes that night - most memorably, outrageously overdressed people on every balcony throwing beads and dollar notes into the crowd below. There wasn't a cab in sight, so we walked two miles back to our B&B, and every drunk we eavesdropped on was making surprisingly lucid proclamations. It was like something out of a Fitzgerald novel, and I was very tempted to just walk the streets all night recording what we heard. 

Sober, N'awlins is still surreally inspiring. I didn't see a single piece of art we didn't want to buy. The most average live music was better than most, and the really good jazz performances blew my mind away. Life slows down in Lousiana - each meal took an hour, every mouthful carefully savored. There was nothing about the city that resembled anything else we'd seen or done in the past. This is why I love travel: you can never take anything for granted when the world's always surprising you. 

I tried to take photos because I realized we hardly ever remember to - we took 15 trips last year and have less than 100 photos to show for it. Sadly, I got caught up in just experiencing NOLA, and took very few pics. I don't regret it, I wouldn't have wanted to interrupt the flow by whipping out a camera. But I thought I'd paint you a quick snapshot with words while it's still fresh in my mind. It's hands down my favorite city in the US.

A.

A spoonful of sugar

R,

Remember last Valentine’s, when you super sweetly put together a hand-cooked candle-light meal of mac and cheese? It was the cutest thing ever, especially since I’m well aware that you think that even ready-to-eat meals are a pain to put together. You obsessed over how the pasta was dry, and offered to put in more water, or add cheese, or… . I hope you remember that I said it was perfectly fine and I loved it.

It was perfectly fine, and I did love it, especially considering the effort you’d put into it. If you’d served me burned pasta with no cheese, it would still have been perfectly fine and I would have loved it. I realize it’s harder to feel similarly magnanimous about the daily meals I cook you – there are so many of them that you have to start taking them for granted a little, or it would be slightly absurd.

It’s great how low maintenance we both are. For the most part, you’ll eat anything, and I really only have to put together one meal in the night, since your office feeds you (and how!). There are no unreasonable demands to make things the way your mother did, or the way my mother did, and thank God for that, because they’re superlative cooks. However, here’s where our opinions diverge, never to meet again.

She thinks: So much repetition when I make dinner every day for the rest of our lives! How do I make this more exciting? What can I try making today?
He thinks: Damn foreign country, I can only get decent food at home. I hope it’s daal-chawal.
She thinks: Stuffed okra? Pumpkin curry?
He thinks: Daal-chawal. Please God, daal-chawal.
She thinks: Fine, if it’ll make him happy, daal-chawal. Again. Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I added aamchur?
He flips his lid. Consistency, woman, where’s the consistency! How can I lust for daal chawal if it’s a different type of daal each time you make it?

Harrumph. I see your point, and I’ll take it, albeit grudgingly. Since you only like about five dishes anyway, I suppose I could write down a recipe and stick to it and make you the same thing each day of the week. That sounds so incredibly boring to me, but I know you’d love it.

I’ll just have to explore my diversity as a cook with my own meals.

In return, I’ll ask for just one thing. You’re mighty vocal when a meal displeases you by not being what you expected it to be. I’d greatly appreciate it if you were to give me a token verbal indication when you’re happy with the meal as well.  I believe that’d be the recipe for a happy marriage, food wise. I even wrote it down.

A.