Intercast Marriage: Story of Urban India

Grandmother was pretending to be lost in prayer, but her prayer-beads were spinning at top speed. That meant she was either excited or upset. Mother
put the receiver down. “Some American girl in his office, she’s coming to stay with us for a week.” She sounded as if she had a deep foreboding. Father had no such doubt. He knew the worst was to come. He had been matching horoscopes for a year, but my brother Vivek had found a million excuses for not being able to visit India, call any of the chosen Iyer girls, or in any other way advance father’s cause. Father always wore four parallel lines of sacred ash on his forehead. Now there were eight, so deep were the furrows of worry on his forehead. I sat in a corner, supposedly lost in a book, but furiously text-messaging my brother with a vivid description of the scene before me. A few days later I stood outside the airport with father. He tried not to look directly at any American woman going past, and held up the card reading “Barbara”. Finally a large woman stepped out, waved wildly and shouted “Hiiii! Mr. Aayyyezh, how ARE you?” Everyone turned and looked at us. Father shrank visibly before my eyes. Barbara took three long steps and covered father in a tight embrace.Father’s jiggling out of it was too funny to watch. I could hear him whispering “Shiva Shiva!”
She shouted “you must be vineet?” “Yes, vineeth” I said with a smile. I imagined little half-Indian children calling me “Vijaantee aunty!”
Suddenly, my colorless existence in Madurai had perked up. For at least the next one week, life promised to be quite exciting.

Soon we were eating lunch at home. Barbara had changed into an even shorter skirt. The low neckline of her spaghetti was just in line with father’s eyes.

He was glaring at mother as if she had conjured up Barbara just to torture him. Barbara was asking “You only have vegetarian food? Always??” as if the idea was shocking to her. “You know what really goes well with Indian food, especially chicken? Indian beer!” she said with a pleasant smile, seemingly oblivious to the apoplexy of the gentleman in front of her, or the choking sounds coming from mother. I had to quickly duck under the table to hide my giggles.

Everyone tried to get the facts without asking the one question on all our minds: What was the exact nature of the relationship between Vivek and Barbara? She brought out a laptop computer. “I have some pictures of Vivek” she said. All of us crowded around her. The first picture was quite innocuous. Vivek was wearing shorts, and standing alone on the beach. In the next photo, he had Barbara draped all over him. She was wearing a skimpy bikini and leaning across, with her hand lovingly circling his neck.
Father got up, and flicked the towel off his shoulder. It was a gesture we in the family had learned to fear. He literally ran to the door and went out.
Barbara said “It must be hard for Mr. Aayyezh. He must be missing his son.” We didn’t have the heart to tell her that if said son had been within reach, father would have lovingly wrung his neck.
My parents and grandmother apparently had reached an unspoken agreement. They would deal with Vivek later. Right now Barbara was a foreigner, a lone woman, and needed to be treated as an honored guest. It must be said that Barbara didn’t make that one bit easy. Soon mother wore a perpetual frown.
Father looked as though he could use some of that famous Indian beer.

Vivek had said he would be in a conference in Guatemala all week, and would be off both phone and email. But Barbara had long lovey-dovey conversations with two other men, one man named Steve and another named Keith. The rest of us strained to hear every interesting word. “I miss you!” she said to both.
She also kept talking with us about Vivek, and about the places they’d visited together. She had pictures to prove it, too. It was all very confusing.

This was the best play I’d watched in a long time. It was even better than the day my cousin adtiya ran away with a anglo Christiangirl. My aunt had come howling through the door, though I noticed that she made it to the plushest sofa before falling in a faint. Father said that if it had been  his child, the door would have been forever shut in his face.
Aunt promptly revived and said “You’ll know when it is your child!” How my aunt would rejoice if she knew of Barbara!
On day five of her visit, the family awoke to the awful sound of Barbara’s retching. The bathroom door was shut, the water was running, but far louder was the sound of Barbara crying and throwing up at the same time. Mother and grandmother exchanged ominous glances. Barbara came out, and her face was red. “I don’t know why”, she said, “I feel queasy in the mornings now.” If she had seen as many Indian movies as I’d seen, she’d know why. Mother was standing as if turned to tone. Was she supposed to react with the compassion reserved for pregnant women? With the criticism reserved for pregnant unmarried women? With the fear reserved for pregnant unmarried foreign women who could embroil one’s son in a paternity suit? Mother, who navigated familiar, flows of married life with the skill of a champion oarsman, now seemed completely taken off her moorings.

She seemed to hope that if she didn’t react it might all disappear like a bad dream.

I made a mental note to not leave home at all for the next week. Whatever my parents would say to Vivek when they finally got a-hold of him would be too interesting to miss. But they never got a chance.

The day Barbara was to leave, we got a terse email from Vivek. “Sorry, still stuck in Guatemala. Just wanted to mention, another friend of mine,
Sameera Sheikh needs a place to stay. She’ll fly in from Hyderabad tomorrow at 10am. Sorry for the trouble.”

So there we were, father and I, with a board saying “Sameera”. At last a pretty young woman in salwar-khameez saw the board, gave the smallest of smiles, and walked quietly towards us. When she did ‘Namaste’ to father, I thought I saw his eyes mist up. She took my hand in the friendliest way and said “Hello, vineeth I’ve heard so much about you.” I  almost had a crush on her.In the car father was unusually friendly. She and Vivek had been in the same group of friends in Ohio University. She now worked as a Child Psychologist.

She didn’t seem to be too bad at family psychology either. She took out a shawl for grandmother, a saree for mother and nothing for me except a box of chocolates.
“Just some small things. I have to meet a professor at Madurai University, and it’s so nice of you to let me stay” she said.Everyone cheered up.
Even grandmother smiled. At lunch she said “This is so nice. When I make sambar, it comes out like chole, and my chole tastes just like sambar”. Mother was
smiling. “Oh just watch for 2 days, you’ll pick it up.” Grandmother had never allowed a muslim to enter the kitchen. But mother seemed to have taken charge, and decided she would bring in who ever she felt was worthy. Sameera circumspectly stayed out of the puja room, but on the third day,I was stunned to see father inviting her in and telling her which idols had come to him from his father. “God is one” he said.

Sameera nodded sagely.
By the fifth day, I could see the thought forming in the family’s collective brains. If this fellow had to choose his own bride, why couldn’t it be someone like Sameera? On the sixth day, when Vivek called from the airport saying he had cut short his Gautemala trip and was on his way home, all had a million things to discuss with him. He arrived by taxi at a time when Sameera had gone to the University.

“So, how was Barbara’s visit?” he asked blithely. “How do you know her?” mother asked sternly. “She’s my secretary” he said. “She works very hard, and she’ll do anything to help.” He turned and winked at me.

Oh, I got the plot now! By the time Sameera returned home that evening, it was almost as if her joining the family was the elders’ idea. “Don’t worry about anything”, they said, “we’ll talk with your parents.”

On the wedding day a huge bouquet arrived from Barbara.
“Flight to India - $1500.
Indian kurta - $5.
Emetic to throw up - $1.
The look on your parents’ faces - priceless” it said.

Mathematics shall be savior of this world!!

Mathematics will save the world someday…I just know it!
Isn’t it sad though, that I’ve always hated this magical savior, thought it absolutely stupid…
But that’s probably because I was never any good at it!

I was watching this documentary about Apollo 13, the other day, and it said that the astronauts on board, knowing that they were only minutes away from destruction, frantically attempted to solve some complicated math problem, which was there only shot at survival…then they called base to have their answers checked!!

I understood nothing of the complex math problem they were talking about (yeah, that’s how thick I am when it comes to math!), but turns out, they did get it right!
And it saved Apollo 13!! Woohoo for math!

So you see, math will save the world…eventually…and I’ll have nothing to do with it!

Posted by cyber monkey at 6:05 AM 8 comments

My father has always been a brilliant story-teller. He can make the most inane tales sound believable. And as a kid, I believed almost everything he told me…

Once when I was little, my Dad told me the story of how God finds the right parents for every kid:
When God had finished making a batch of babies, he said,(one can only imagine that God has a lot of baby-dough, which he shaped into individual babies, and put them in the heavenly oven to cook!), he would hand each baby a whole bunch of parent pamphlets, and glossy catalogues with pictures and brief descriptions of each set of parents to choose from.
Of course the descriptions were VERY brief indeed, because if he gave away the details, no parents would ever get picked, and heaven would be crawling with an entire population of accumulating babies!
So the babies picked the parents they wanted…(nobody said what’d happen if two or more babies wanted the same set of parents…hmmm…), and after every baby had been matched with it’s parents, they’d be sent down to earth…this is probably where the storks came in to deliver the pickle bundles of joy!

Dad said he was very grateful that I’d picked them!

Heart break Mall

That bright and golden red autumn day was not the first time I had seen her there, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I knew that she wouldn’t stop coming until she herself was no longer in this world. Seeing her always struck a sad, poignant note within me. She was the beneficiary of a long, rich, full and exciting life in many of the towns people’s opinion, but watching her there, at the cemetery, so many times, I had to wonder if they really knew what her life had been like. She had come alone since she was able to drive herself then. When she climbed out of the car and started down the walk, she was dressed in an elegant black dress that was folded to her slender figure as if it were a part of her body instead of an apparel to cover it. She had worn a wide brimmed hat with a veil covering her face and her neatly coiffure hair. But as she drew closer to the first of the graves, she raised the veil so I could see her face. i finally had the courage to ask her what she was doing in such a dead town of half a million of population?. She replied with a poise of an lady that her father was the owner many malls which are mainly serve and sell electronic goods all the western coast of America. I co-assist him in his work recently we have launched a online shopping site of our brand so that our brand can compete with the others in e-business too.

I thought she must be very eager to tell the whole story about this project and I guess this must be her first job, I myself had the joy of telling my story to the whole world when I sold my first Teak wood logs two years back. She went on “Most of the buyer will look for the lowest price that can we get from any store. We spent a lot of time to look for the goods and compare and contrast the price with other stores. This way Online stores are of great help as stores any where in the world can be compared and evaluated within a matter of few clicks. When come to the compare and contrast the price often the least priced stores wins the deals” That is what we are doing now with our online store. What is called I asked, ” savebuckets.co.uk” she said “It shall house all major brands like Asda, Compaq, hp, PC World and vaio under one roof”. The new mall which we are opening shall actually serve more as an store house of goods for this online store as the economic standards of the town is not good enough to afford such items. What items ? I almost barged into her, items like It includes clothing, laptops , playstation , slr cameras, bluetooth devices, micro wave appliances and many more.

I am here to promote the store and get the wide bushes covering the area to be cleared. The bushes were the sources of my income and were actually my sunflower fields through which i draw the oils and sell them in the market but it seems the rich have taken away all of it my land, the bliss of this small town and her too.what a heart break !!!