My tryst with marriage: Part Four - Attack!
This ad was supposed to appear in the papers for 4 consecutive weeks and the responses would be sent to us by every Friday through courier. Come Friday and my parents would be waiting anxiously for the courier delivery person to see the responses we had received.
Their excitement knew no bounds when they would see a bunch of responses in the envelope addressed to them. I had to pinch myself hard to sense this was happening for real. There were people out there who were falling to this bait and expressing their interest in my profile.
But their excitement was short lived. As I was going through the profiles I realized none of them was even 1/100000th part of the definition for my ideal partner. Then just like in Bollywood movies my father’s words echoed in my ears. “We will not force anything on you. The final decision is yours and only yours.”
WOW…time to rejoice.
I immediately started rejecting the proposals on very trivial reasons like height, nature of job, geographical location, self description etc. In short I was fulfilling my desire of not getting married right now by buying some time and at the same time letting by parents fulfill their desire of finding a groom for me.
To be honest I was kind of enjoying all this. I had begun to derive some sort of sadist pleasure from this activity. As days passed I was getting better at it. I would look at the profile, make a pitiable face having mastered it in front of the mirror a zillion times by now and then ask my parents, “ Don’t you think ………?” giving some trivial reason I could conjure up at the spur of the moment.
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| Some of the reminders I would keep getting daily! |
This was enough to get their thinking horses running which would eventually end up in a big and firm “NO”.
This kind of became a weekend activity for all of us. Every Saturday evening once I and Dad were back from office we would all have a rectangle table conference with high tea and snacks for company. The grooms would be first sorted basis my mother’s preferences, then as per my dad’s choice and in the end would be in my hands to be chosen from. Very smartly overlooking all the pluses in each one of them I would start highlighting their minuses much too every one’s dismay.
I was proud of my conniving nature.
How smartly had I managed to hoodwink my parents into believing I was all game for this marriage thing and still have my own way? I wish I had known at that time how wrong I was. I had underestimated the super power of something known as tears.
These tears have a lot of power, especially when they come from the women you love in your life for e.g. your mother, wife, and girlfriend. The tears have the power to melt the strongest of the mountains and reduce them to small harmless pebbles. This is exactly what happened to me; something what I had not anticipated at all.
~To be continued
