Sighing and Groaning

My mum did not meet my dad at some party, over cigarette smoke and vodka shots. The story does not go like, “So I ran to the loo, to adjust my dress strap and on the way I saw him standing there, with his back against the wall... “

Nope, my dad was like William. You know, the Conqueror. She had rejected hordes of marriage proposals before he walked into her living room with my grandmother. He came, he saw and he conquered, under my grandmother’s careful supervision of course.

I can imagine my dadi as she climbed the steps of the Agra bungalow, her mind whirring with mental checklists. Punjabi. Check. Beautiful with child-bearing hips. Check. Cooks. Cleans. Sings. Check check check....

My mom continues, ‘I had six beautiful months to decide whether I wanted him or not. He took me for movies and dinners, the works...’

It’s cute and Victorian. It’s my mother, so I am glad that there are no vodka shots involved. I don’t even understand my cynicism, they’re happy. They are in love. A love that is way more long-term and scrupulous than the kind that my friend’s fall into.

And because I am her daughter, she does not want me playing the fallen woman, who adjusts her straps in bathroom mirrors, in my love story either.

‘No alcohol’ she told me at an unnecessarily young age. ‘And no cigarettes... ever’

I would rather have men dropping out of the sky, than walking in through the living room door, for me.

“You’ll fall in love with the right guy”, she would tell me, “At the right time.”
The right time, was a very ambiguous term. Sometimes it extended to college, sometimes it extended across years. I was not supposed to question/debate the right time. It was fate. It was ‘parental fate’, which, as we all know, is of the worst kind.

Until I reached that right time, my mother told me, I was to study. Because that was my entire life’s purpose. “It is all you have to do beta. Just study. Forget everything else. You are not supposed to be doing anything else. You are only supposed to be studying.”

She found a Mills and Boons under my pillow once.

“What is all this sighing and groaning?” She screamed, quoting indirectly from the text, “Aren’t you supposed to be studying?!!”