So the parents are looking for a groom for moi... having given me ample opportunity to find someone on my own, and having seen me not really do much about it, the good parents decided to take matters into their own hands, in order to be able to fulfill their last remaining 'responsibility' as parents...
And thus began the hunt...preceded of course by what my parents thought were discreet enquiries about my 'preferences' regarding the prospective husband...'you want someone tall?', 'obviously, he'll be Bengali', 'the horoscopes will need to be matched...let's speak to [...] (our family astrologer)', 'Of course, we'll try and ensure that you don't have to move, but, you know, just in case, do you have any preferences in terms of any other cities that you would be willing to move to?' etc. etc.
In due course, I found myself alongwith the parents and another elderly couple at the gates of one of the older clubs of Calcutta, waiting for a family, whose son and scion I was supposed to meet. Said family made its appearance some five minutes later and we all made our way in to the seating area overlooking a lake, which bore a curiously deserted look, which was explained by the sole forlorn-looking waiter as being a result of the fact that the club caterers were not coming in that day, it being a national holiday. The waiter however, did manage to rustle up some sandwiches to go with tea (we were, after all, ostensibly there for tea), and my parents, parents of the Said Boy ("SB" for ease of reference) and the other elderly couple, through whom the parents had come to be introduced to SB's parents, settled down on the chairs made available to us.
The predictable followed..polite, slightly awkward interaction between the two sets of parents, between the parent and the prospective daughter/ son-in-law and between SB and me. Satisfied with their interrogation, and the limited interation between SB and me, the parents, in their infinite wisdom, decided to finalise matters and seal the deal, so to speak...the wedding date was duly finalised and therafter followed a slightly formal, but parent approved, courtship period...
For good or for bad, SB and I discovered over the course of the next few months that we were really different people with nothing in common, and hence decided to close things out before they got any further....of course, this decision was accompanied by the usual unpleasantness, name-calling, blame game, et al...but to cut a long story short, the parents' first attempt at finding a husband for me came to a slightly abrupt and premature end...
Not to be dettered, the parents promptly got to work and within a couple of months, had lined up Another Prospective Groom ("APG"). Things got off to a fairly good start with APG - we were of nearly the same age..we spent hours chatting, going for plays, attending concerts...the works. Somewhere along the way, the parents visited me, met APG's parents, who seemed to be really sweet, chilled out people and, of course...broached the topic of marriage. APG's parents seemed fairly enthusiastic, promised to visit and actually did visit the old folks at our house back home, and things began moving towards a discussion about possible wedding dates.
In the midst of all this, however, APG and more disturbingly, his mother ("MIL", henceforth - no, not ma-in-law...Monster In the Lurk, gettit?) increasingly began talking in not so happy tones about my work, the work hours...suddenly there was a long list of what I had done wrong, how I didn't care, how I ALWAYS prioritised work over APG, and beat this...over MIL. MIL especially was very upset with me about how on exactly two occassions, I had shown up late by about half an hour, causing her poor puppy to have to wait at the bustling train station...oh the horror!!!
One fine day, MIL decided enough was enough and decided to sit me down for a chat...about how I was not the one for her precious lil diamond, and how she wasn't very happy about the match..of course, I was too dumbstruck at that time to even point out that the "match" was something that had been approved by the parents, who actually introduced APG and me. In a long winding lecture where she touched upon issues best not mentioned in polite company, she eventually declared that she would need to think about whether she could include me in her family or not. Needless to say, the precious lil diamond for whom this battle was waged was nowhere to be found, having chosen to hide under MIL's pallu (figuratively only, I hope...). And of course, I am yet to hear from her.
Am I heartbroken? Hell, no...but I'd be lying if I were to say that I have remained completely unaffected by two such emotional upheavals in the course of one year...the blame game, the whole feeling of having to sell myself short, the unpleasantness, the longing to have someone who actually thought about me as opposed to only themselves...they did take a toll. It would not be an exaggeration for me now to say that I don't have the strength or the courage to get into another relationship..."love", "arranged" or anything in between.
How did you manage, Susanna?*
*reference to the protagonist of "Susanna's Seven Husbands" by Ruskin Bond, recently popularised by the Bollywood movie, "7 Khoon Maaf"
