29 April 2016

Sold!…

… for a phone (that too landline) and a car. Those were the demands she had back in Oct 1992 before she would agree to marry me. (To put this in perspective, in those days in the small town we came from, both a phone and a car were novelties and not owned by most). Not one to give in to negotiations too early, I had simple frowned at her. She conceded immediately that it did not have to be very soon – just some time in our married life. I had un-frowned.

Two days later, I told her that we might have to get married earlier – in fact before even she could finish college – and get the passports ready because my company was transferring me to US.

First day, I land in US, my company had a landline and a rental car ready for us. Easiest sale ever!!

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28 April 2016

It gets funnier every year…

Over dinner this evening:

Me: “I do not have any scheduled meetings in the morning. If you are free, we can go out for lunch.”
Sharmila: “No. The pest control guy will come at 10 am.”
Me: “Okay”

And the dinner proceeded.

After about half an hour (when Nikita declared she did not need any more help from me for her homework)…

Me: “Okay, then I am going to go upstairs and retire.”
She: “Are you going to sleep now?”
Me: “No. It is 9PM. I will probably catch up on some reading”
She: “Or you can help me clean up the kitchen”.
[She said this pointing to the one ketchup bottle that was still left after I had cleaned out all the dishes. I will leave the topic of irony here since more is to come]
Me: “I already did it” [as I put the solitary bottle left back in its place]

…and to add some twist to that I continued…
Me: “Now I am going to go upstairs and reflect on twenty three years of our marriage. By the way do you know how many years we have been married?”

Now, if you follow my blogposts regularly, you probably know by now that she absolutely cannot remember our birthdays, our anniversaries and all those good stuff. She will remember your face and name if she met you twenty years back, but she can’t figure out how many years we have been married! I got my twentieth anniversary gift on our nineteenth anniversary!

She knew I was just picking on her. So, she retorted – “I don’t know and I don’t want to know..”. I know she said that but in her mind, she was trying to start the subtraction process. You know how I knew that?

Because, about eight seconds later, she turned around and screamed “IT IS OUR ANNIVERSARY TOMORROW”!

And I stood there scratching my head wanting to ask her – “So, what was your first hint?” 🙂

The best part of twenty three years of marriage? Exactly this kind of moments of comic relief!!

Category: Humor, My Family | 86 Comments on It gets funnier every year…
23 April 2016

“I don’t get no respect”

Somehow she thinks I cannot boil a couple of eggs without very detailed instructions. Okay, I will give it to you that once I did try to boil eggs without putting water first. But still…

“Pls. switch it on”??? What was she thinking? I was going to just stare at the eggs and hope they merrily boil away?

Man, “I don’t get no respect” around this house 🙂

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17 April 2016

Sunday early morning – New York bound…

Times have changed a lot. We are flying to New York so that Natasha can decide which of the two last colleges that she has narrowed her choices to would she reject.
Back in India, times were simpler. Actually, there was not much of a choice – unless you were willing to pick up a life long battle against parents, relatives and society in general. The way it worked for me was as simple as this – you got a good rank? Great – you are going to Computer Science. What is your rank exactly? Ok. You will not get the first college but you will get your second college.
That was it! That was how I found out that I was going to Chennai (Madras) to study Computer Science. The first day I saw the college was the day I packed up my stuff, said goodbye to family and about 33 hours of train ride later entered the campus as a fresh student.
Life is way more complicated now. But kids are far more mature these days too. And that is why I am pretty impressed how methodically kids these days make their choices.
One remaining question – but, why do I have to get up at 3:30 am to catch a flight? I thought I was done with my decisions 🙂

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2 April 2016

The futility of it all…

The good news is that she acknowledges that she is forgetful … and therefore writes down lists.
The bad news is that she is too forgetful to even remember to take the list with her.
When I called her up, she reassured me that she remembered the four items. So far so good. The tactical mistake on her part was to try and prove it by trying to rattle off the items from memory…
Like I was saying …. 🙂

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19 March 2016

One final tryst…

It was getting close to lunchtime on Friday which meant that I needed to get going back to Kalyani. However, there was still time for one more set of parents – the thirteenth one this trip, if you are keeping count.

One call to Chandigarh where my friend Sandeep lives now and I had the local Durgapur address of his parents. Armed with that and about an hour at hand, I headed towards Mr.and Mrs. Banerjee. Who used to be literally our next door neighbor. As in, our houses shared walls.

It was great to see both of them but unfortunately, age has extracted its toll from both of them. There were occasional glimpses of the jovial nature and the smile of Mrs. Banerjee. It was at least heartening to see that both of them are able to move around by themselves and seemed to be happy with their lot.

I still remember when we moved into that neighborhood, on the very first day, I had gathered the local kids around (I was elder to most of them), drawn three straight lines on the outer wall of the Banerjees’ house with a small brick piece and that is how the local cricket game that day got started. Even Mr. Banerjee got into the game – he volunteered to be our umpire!! All that was fine, but I remember him not declaring my brother out on what I thought was a clean catch I had myself caught. He told me that younger kids deserved a couple of more chances.

I bitterly reminded him of that incident yesterday. Unlike that day, on this day, all of us laughed. Including me 🙂

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