The Great Indian Lower Middle Class Marriages:

Episode 2

The nubile boy and his expectations from a girl 

Ashwin is from a lower middle class farmer family. It is quite evident that a farmer’s son can be nothing but an honourable member of the highly sought after lower middle class strata. He struggles hard to get a degree but his fault is that he isn’t an engineering graduate. 

“Which type of girl do you want?” I asked him after succeeding in pulling the first bite of a lower middle class cousin of sandwich- padapav.

“She should be a family person who respects the value of relationships” he said sipping the tea. He had already gulped the vadapav with a flourish of a regular connoisseur of this ‘tight budget appeaser’

“Okay, good.” I said diffidently as i knew he was asking for the moon. “What happened with the girl you saw last week?” I asked.

“I rejected her. Actually she was a graduate in the arts and too old fashioned to suit in Pune...” he said looking out at the street.                                                                                                                                                                   The chances were that he would be rejected by the girl. But i didn’t go deeper. Why should i poke the fresh wound of my friend?  So I rather preferred to take  a mouthful of Wadapav to block the obstinate, restless words in my throat and sent them back with the gulp. 

“She was too old fashioned for you to suit in Pune?” I tried rhetoric coated with euphemism in the attempt to hide sarcasm.

“Yes. The way she behaved she looked like an aunty, speaking a mugged lesson...” Ashwin said haphazardly. He wanted to say more but probably couldn’t form the sentence. “...and she was undereducated...” he concluded. 

Now I had finished wadapav and beckoned for the cutting tea. I looked at Ashwin intently and he fiddled in his seat.

“It means you want a well educated girl who will try her best to be a family person while managing to be modern and suitable in pune...” I said in one breath. I too wanted to say more but my raised voiced had already raised some necks and eyebrows in the restaurant. So I kept quite.

My explanation hit him and he sighed deep and ordered one more Wadapav. He might want to munch his obstinate thoughts with Wadapav and tea.

  

“Don’t confuse me Viraag. I am already messed up” he said and took the damn whole green roasted chilly between his teeth. 

‘You can’t ward off the thoughts like that’ it was my restless thought. I wanted to convert it into a yell then thought the better of it. 

“So what’s the next plan?” I asked to take him to future as the present had the dark shadow of the failures from the past. 

“Pub” Ashwin said  illuminating like a flickering tube light which suddenly got a push of high volt. His eyes were moving with something behind me, mouth half opened and eyes full of new young light.

When I looked behind me I found the topic of marriage running way from the back door of my brain, as two gorgeous girls entering the restaurant flaunting their divine epitome of beauty. For the next don’t-know-how-many minutes we didn’t speak anything. The necks that had been raised in contempt after my loud remark were now waving in admiration and moving like cranes till the girls bought something in a parcel and left the restaurant.

“Do hell with the marriage for the time being. Let’s go” Ashvin got up from the seat and reached the counter to pay the bill, anyway i am slow when it comes to head to the bill counter. The just disappered eye candies had ignited in him the idea of merging himself on the dance floor with the booze and probably with fair sex strangers at the other ends of the string of ‘no-string-attached’ relationship. 

I sighed and followed Ashvin for my next episode.

The Great Indian Lower Middle Class Marriages.

The great Indian lower middle class marriages..

Episode 1

The more you try to be secure, the greater you become vulnerable and the harder life gets for you.

In the sake of making the life of a nubile girl and a boy secure, the family members (for whom this whole marriage business is a responsibility and nothing more) shake the heaven and earth. In the effort of becoming clever, they don’t know when they have crossed the boundary of cleverness and entered the territory of cunningness. 

The funniest thing about this hunt for a right partner is the crooked nature of the game. The futile things are kings here and the vital things are downright neglected. The battle is between the salary of the groom versus fair complexion of the girl or the property of the groom versus character of the bride. Nobody thinks if the boy likes the girl or the girl likes the boy. The term ‘love’ is already declared outdated in this jargon.

A writer once published boasts of the rejection slips he got from the publishers. The greater the number, the more he feels honoured. But in the marriage run, it isn’t the case. The more are you rejected, the deeper is your depression and larger are the chances of your rejection. Such is the vicious circle and there is nothing to boast about yourself after the publication, i mean..marriage.

To get the clear idea of the scenario,let’s have a peep into the life of a middle class boy who has, at last decided to get married in arrange marriage.

The name of the boy is Ashwin. Here we go.