#100sareepact Day49
#sareefrommypast
A same-saree date with a mystery fellow pacter! You have all of today to guess who she is, till she decides to reveal herself tomorrow. Lips sealed on this subject for now except to tell you that we had the loveliest time. Unbelievable that we met for the first time yesterday and did not even know the other existed five months ago!
The saree I am wearing, a Madurai cotton is a gift from the lovely lady. Isn’t the saree gorgeous? ( Or should that be ‘Aren’t the sarees gorgeous?’?) You can imagine what it was like when we went gallivanting around all of Jaipur city, sightseeing and of course, shopping, wearing same-pinch sarees! After some time we forgot that we were wearing identical clothes and even stopped noticing the weird looks, if any.
I absolutely love this saree. More than thirty five years ago, I had the exactly same colour-combo Madurai cotton, except for the zari on the border. You can see me wearing it in my ‘matrimonial’ studio photo. Just in case you are wondering, I wore contact lenses those days, so I am not misleading prospective grooms about my eyesight. So I must now share my groom hunting stories with you.
The first ‘boy’ who ‘approved’ my pic was a really handsome Navy officer, so his photo told me. It was decided that the boy and his family would come to ‘see the girl’ at my aunt’s place. I wore a saree and demurely walked into a room full of several faces, some known and others unknown. The Navy officer jumped up to greet me. That is when I realized that my good looking hero was vertically challenged! He casually chatted with me about this and that while my family and his beamed approvingly at us. Thankfully, I was not required to pour out the tea or carry around the samosas and sweets. They left after about half an hour, promising to get back with their decision the next day.
Meanwhile, I threw a fit. Bred on stories of the tall, dark and handsome men of Mills and Boons romances, no way I was going to marry a man who, leave alone towering over me (like any self-respecting prospective groom would), barely could match my height! And so started a war of words.
In our times, the girl did not ever get to meet the boy, before marriage. Well, this is my time, not yours, pat came the reply.
Girls do not reject boys, especially after approving their pics and meeting them. This girl could and did, was the retort.
This girl was going to get a reputation for being choosy and arrogant. This girl did not care, was the defiant answer.
That is when my aunt presented me with a classic counter argument. “In a marriage,” she declared, “it is necessary for only either the groom or the bride to be tall. If tall girls marry only tall boys, how will the short boys ever have tall children?” This logic being unanswerable, I had to resort to tantrums.
Finally, my mother was informed that the family washed their hands off me. Which suited me pretty well, you can imagine.
Now we come to Prospective Groom Number Two. Due enquiries were made and he was the right height, 6’2″, I was informed, a doctor to boot. He also happened to live in a lovely little town in the foothills of the Himalayas. Was it not my dream to eventually settle down there? This time we were to meet at our tiny two roomed flat. I refused to wear a saree and dressed instead in a pair of blue corduroy Levi’s and a white cheesecloth top. My glasses nested firmly over my nose. He should know who I am, I declared. We peeped from behind the curtains as a broad giant of a man got gingerly off the cab escorted by his sharp looking mother and elder sister. He looked anything but comfortable and as he minced his way to the steps leading to our first floor flat, we discovered the reason why. His brand new, shiny black pointed shoes pinched! Things were not going to get better for him. Dr. Akhileshwarendra Nath K…, freshly arrived from the salubrious climes of a pretty hill town, sweated profusely in the grimy heat of Delhi, despite the air cooler, as he was cross questioned on his views on feminism by his prospective bride. His mother and sister looked shell shocked by this sudden turn of events where the interviewers became the interviewed; the bride-to-be’s mother first glared and then looked plainly unhappy; the prospective bride’s brothers appeared to be highly entertained by the evening’s proceedings. As I look back, I squirm at the thought of that nasty ‘sheher ki ladki’ who gave that poor small- town boy, who was actually probably a very sweet person, such a bad time. All because she did not like his sneering female relatives. In any case, both parties were probably much better off without each other. This time the rejection came, as it rightly should, from the groom’s side. Not that ‘this girl’ cared! That was the end of the groom hunting.
All the names and characters of this story are fictional…?