Met two friends yesterday. Separately. One over lunch and one on the long drive back home. KP and Aar, the friends I met are studies in contrast. KP’s moving out of India soon and therefore the hurried lunch and attempted bonding session. She is smart, sexy and a total career girl. She and hubby live on their own. When I met her yesterday, KP was “fielding” a call from her ma-in-law. She finished it, rolled her eyes and informed me that “the woman” just won’t leave her alone.
“Now that we are moving, she wants to throw a dinner for us, with the entire family,” she whined.
Thinking that’s pretty much what my ma-in-law would’ve done too if I were to move out of the city and thinking I could have handled an evening of relatives, I made the mistake of saying, ‘pretty natural yaar, go ahead.’
Of course, you’ll think so, you good bahu, KP smirked.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be blogging about this but yesterday this comment, the good bahu bit, got my goat. Ever since I married P and moved to Delhi to live with his family, I haven’t heard the last of it from some people who thought bindaas me was sacrificing her independence. They were convinced I was going to turn into a ‘salwar kameezed, chai ka tray carrying’ person who would have to say goodbye to her jeans. When I broke the not so spicy news that the dreaded ‘in laws’ were a conservative lot but pretty much happy to let me do my own stuff and treated me exactly like they treated any other child of theirs, it wasn’t treated with much approval. This didn’t lend itself to juicy gossip. Poor girl, must’ve been brainwashed. Must be wanting to keep a happy front. Tch, tch…
KP and I met on and off all these years because before Anita decided to make Delhi her temporary (?) home and made me vvvvvvv happy, KP, and my mad friend B, were the only two old fiends I had here. KP always joked about my ‘good bahu act’ in quite a sarcastic way, especially after I couldn’t stay overnight at her place once because there was a family function to attend the next morning. She was a friend and fun to be with so I didn’t mind it much, until yesterday. Because I cannot see why KP has to brand anyone who doesn’t live life the way she does. KP has known her husband, R, since college. He comes from a middle class background. Her dad is a top-notch corporate boss. R’s first foreign visit was on their honeymoon. She has been travelling forever. Naturally, KP can’t ‘stand’ her very middle class ma-in-law. And ‘won’t be bullied’ by her sis-in-law. Forget keeping in touch with them, she gets quite pissed that despite staying apart and despite his busy schedule, R does call up and visit his mom and sis often. That he doesn’t ever expect, let alone ask her to, is totally lost on her. And when she complains about the little socialising she has to do with the ‘in-laws’, it doesn’t occur to her that she inflicts her parents on her husband often. Of course, her parents are ‘fun’ and it helps that her dad is a member of upscale clubs like India Habitat Centre, Delhi Golf Club and The Gymkhana, where Sundays are always sooo much fun to spend.
Do I sound like I am bitching about someone for no reason? Perhaps I do but I need to get this out. Trust me, I’d nothing to say about KP’s life until yesterday. Until I realised she had been sitting on judgement all the while on me and a couple of other friends, without even knowing things for the way they were. Now that I have moved to my own place, she’s thrilled that I have ‘my space’ at last. I am thrilled too. But KP just won’t believe if I told her I had ‘my space’ earlier as well in the dreaded joint family.
Anyway, post KP, I met Aar in the evening. She lives close to my place, so I dropped her home. Aar is married to a common friend of P and mine. It was a love marriage, totally against her parents’ wishes. The reason? Very different backgrounds, pretty much the same scene as KP’s. But Aar went ahead and made the best of a very challenging situation simply because she loved her guy and yes, the family may have been trying but she wanted to do the best for them as they were important to him. About a year and half back, Aar found her husband was seeing another woman. Things have been downward for her ever since. She’s moved to her parents’ with her little daughter, because of whom she’d earlier taken a sabbatical from work. She has a job and is trying to balance work and being a single parent. She’s also trying to save enough money to get a place of her own and move out, a tough deal. Her husband stands at that supremely convenient zone called ‘dilemma,’ saying the other woman is out of his life and throwing the decision making ball at Aar’s court. ‘What did I do wrong?’ Aar was wondering yesterday and before you think she’s the whimpering, pining type who blames herself at the drop of a hat, nope, she was just wondering why the relationships she’d worked so hard on had to fall flat so soon. She reminded me of KP; so carefree and indifferent in her own world and I thought once again that it isn’t cool to be good or nice. It doesn’t pay probably.