26, single and a through and through 90s
kid, I have grown up on a healthy appetite of romantic movies such as Hum Apke
Hain Koun, Dil To Pagal Hai, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge, etc. All 90s kids
in India know what I'm talking about and if you’ve seen these movies you know I
undersell it when I say healthy. For me romance has been just that. Being told
I'm loved, mixed with an outward and obvious show of love. That’s the kind of
personality I have and I make no excuses for it.
My parents have always been a stark
contrast to me. Reserved and extremely conscious, it has always been a big deal
if I can steal a kiss or a hug from them. My parents are even less
demonstrative with each other and I rarely see them hug or say ‘I Love You’. I
have always wondered how this worked and somewhere in my head I decided that
when I finally get married, my marriage will not look like that.
My parents had an arranged marriage. My
grandmum saw my mother at a function and decided this was the girl who was
going to make an honest man out of her son. Stage was set and my parents were
engaged without even meeting each other. They were engaged for two years during
which my parents respectively finished their CA and MA. They also took these
two years to finally meet each other (along with their siblings) and write
letters to each other. On Sept 30th 1984, my parents were married.
30 years on, I see my parents as two friends ambling along life and having as
much fun as they can while managing their respective jobs and two over demanding
daughters.
Ever so often, there are experiences in
your life that make you question everything you know and believe you understand
about life. On one of my mother’s innumerable travels to Delhi, she decided she
was going to take the train. Thanks to
our miscalculation of the travel time and traffic in Bombay, she was running
late and would almost definitely have to make a run for it to catch the
train. While I waited for her call to tell me she had reached, I noticed that
my dad seemed nervous beyond words. For the one and half hour it took my mum to
reach her destination, all my dad did was pace around the living room with the
phone in his hand, picking it up in the first ring.
My initial reaction was to laugh it off but
then I finally saw it. That was love. For my parents it wasn’t about the demonstration
of love. For them, love was worrying whether my dad had had his medicines, or
my mum made it in time for a travel. It was what made my mother want to make
lunch for my dad despite a back ache and what made my dad drive her for an
important meeting irrespective of his schedule.
In that moment my concept of love changed. Just when I believed I knew
and understood what I want from life, I realized, maybe what I wanted was
something completely different. When all the chemistry and passion has died
down and the novelty and excitement is gone, what I really want is a friend.
Someone I can talk to about books, music, movies, sports and life in general.
Someone I can laugh, cry and be crazy with. In the end, after 20 – 30 odd
years, if my daughter was to write this, I hope she’d write it this way too.
