Talking is certainly not my cup of tea while for her that’s her bread and butter. She hails from Mumbai, a city of dreams, home to Bollywood and the financial capital of India with a hectic life. I belong to Chennai, which still maintains its cultural ethos and struggles to find the right equilibrium between traditional values and modern requirements. In this context, our matchmaking was fixed and our expectations of each other were quite different like the cities we belonged to and identified ourselves with.
Though inherently from a Brahmin family, hers being more orthodox than ours, due to the cities where we lived and the exposure to modern lifestyles, her father had given her certain liberties with time. Unfortunately, this was not available either to her elder brother or her sisters. She was easygoing and liked to move out and mingle with friends and family. For me, both my parents were working, and I had a certain number of liberties but then due to my nature, I was more a home-bound person than an outgoing personality.
After our betrothal, she moved to Mumbai, and we were somewhat in constant touch through phones. You can wonder how much I could speak…I don’t recall the conversations I had with her now but then yes, I enjoyed it, nevertheless. It’s always nice and gives you a manly feeling when you are in love and loved.
However, I believe I started giving her lectures on how I expect my woman to be…set in more by seeing the mother as an example…as being independent and being able to lead their own lives from the front and not being dependent on me. This was starkly in contrast to what she was seeing at her home. Her mom is a housewife, and her father is the breadwinner. In my house, both mom and dad worked, and mom had to juggle between work and home managing everything ably. With all these expectations, she got a little worried and was not sure if she could manage post-marriage when it could become unrealistic.
It dawned on me quite late that I should be more romantic at this stage in my life than preaching about my outlook and how we should plan our life etc. My dad, being an artist, used to collect a lot of foreign magazines for his artwork. I used to cut certain pictures, quotes, etc. to paste them in my cupboards and walls in my room. I pulled out some of the stuff and created a romantic leaflet. It is in the same sequence as I had sent it to her. (I told her to keep it safe from prying eyes and to bring it back from Mumbai when she comes for Marriage…so it comes back to me) She did like it very much and at last, heaved a sigh of relief that this guy was after all not as boring and dreary as it turned out to be initially.
Beautiful Life 