Spring clean your Marriage

Just about everyone spring cleans their homes, at least once a year. In the West it’s during spring – when carpets can be aired, winter clothes put away, junk thrown out, windows opened to let out stale winter air and let in the freshness of spring. Here in India the cleaning fever grips us before our festivals, and the more tidy amongst us will spring clean at least once a month. We do it, not as a chore, but as a chance to run our eye and our duster over all our possessions - cleaning, mending, discarding, replacing, rediscovering. Lurking pests and fungus are shown the door, and now we’re sure that nothing scary is going to jump out at us. It’s a great feeling. Once we’re done, we have the satisfaction of knowing how things stand in every nook and corner of our home. Every area – the parts that are visible and in regular use, as well as tucked away unseen areas – have been examined and blessed with our attention and efforts. And we’re all set, or one should say reset, to enjoy the joys of being a householder.
It’s the same with our cars – servicing, regular petrol filling, maintaining tyre pressure, cleaning inside and out, listening out for any odd noises. How well and how routinely we manage all this.
Many of us do a fairly good job of maintaining our bodies too. And if we don’t, the ill-effects show up soon enough and quite obviously so, in the form of weight gain or illness - so we’re forced to take stock of our habits and make some quick and sustainable changes.
With our careers too, we see to it that things remain on track. Our own ambitions and the demands of corporate life demand that we remain focused, skillful, flexible and forward-moving; and that we learn to manage our relationships at work.
So there it is, then: our homes, our cars, our bodies, our jobs – all of them routinely get their share of attention and care.
However, the most important relationships in our lives - the ones that will outlive our homes and cars and jobs and even our bodies - we treat as if they’re completely weather-proof, Teflon-coated, maintenance-free, unbreakable and come with a lift-time warranty. We leave them out in the rain, we scratch them, we provide them little nourishment, we toss them around, making big dents and small ones.
How come?
It’s usually because our relationships are ‘expected’ to take the wear and tear. Marriage is one such relationship. The definition itself, in every culture, says ‘for better or for worse’, ‘till death do us part’, etc. But many of us don’t seem to read the fine print – or the fine print is not pointed out to us – it says: ‘highly inflammable; not to be loose shunted.’
Which means that when we enter marriage, we’re undertaking something, like all high-energy projects, with tremendous and powerful potential. And for this power to work for us, we need to handle it with care and follow certain protocols for maintenance and troubleshooting:

Fuel efficiency and body work: Tired, underfed or overfed, unkempt bodies are a serious marital-energy sapper. Don’t ignore the early warning signs that come from your mirror and from gentle jokes made by your spouse. Commit to staying fit and reasonably slim, for yourself as well as for each other. Work, kids, ‘i’ll do it if you do it’ – none of these excuses are valid. What’s the fuss really? Make small but sustainable changes in your eating habits. Don’t wait for a gym to open up nearby or the weather to change or for the right shoes. All you need is enough space to stretch, a walking track or a quiet lane or even the corridor of your building, and 30 minutes. It’s bound to rust-proof your marriage.

Odd noises: Listen to yourself speak to your spouse. So many couples complain that “he/she talks so sweetly to the rest of the world and is so careless/nasty with me”. And no, that is not a sign that you’re ‘comfortable’ with one another and being formal with the rest of the world. If this is the case, you need to rethink your definition of what communication with your spouse means. All that warmth and good cheer that you reserve for even the neighbour who irritates you – do redirect some of it homewards. And it doesn’t always have to be Words. It can be completely non-verbal, and yet caring and intimate, respectful and warm, in public as well as private.

Tyre rotation and retreading: The worst marital skids take place when we let the interesting grooves and grids of our personalities wear out. We married in the first place because we liked certain facets of each other’s personalities. Over just a few years, those seem to vanish, or are reserved only for the outside world. While the marriage itself runs on bald, featureless tyres. Redefine your grooves and patterns, evolve – on your own and with your spouse – and you’ll continue to have a great grip on the bylanes as well as the highways of marital life.

Pest control: Parasites, pests and fungi find their way into every marriage in the form of well-meaning meddlers and malicious manipulators – these could be some of your friends, family, even spiritual/financial/psychological advisers. They usually thrive on discord and your intimate secrets. Keep them firmly out. If they have crept in, take a joint decision on the best way to get rid of them. Remember, however, not to use toxic methods that could be hazardous to your marriage. Humour and a gentle nudge should do the trick. Most importantly, you have to agree with each other about who the real pests are and how best they can be thrown out.

Planned shutdowns and timeouts: Every system needs a break – a genuine one. Hectic holidays, expensive dinners, major partying – they create the illusion of relaxation. They’re usually a source of much stress, as we’ve all experienced. The airports are overflowing with bored looking couples looking in two different directions, ‘holidaying together’. Find what you really enjoy doing as a couple. Also find what you like to do alone and go do it, without guilt. It’s completely ok to seek and give each other time on your own – whether to read, stare into space, walk, play a game or go out with friends.

Safety features: Put them in place. Wear a helmet to protect yourselves from falling financial/health/emotional equipment. Wear seatbelts of restraint so that neither of you hurt yourselves and each other with sudden shocks. Install a smoke detector – so that you’re not just running from a fire or consumed by it.

Discard and upgrade: Throw out outmoded attitudes and grudges. Forgiveness, that much-touted and much-misunderstood word, is the key. All marriages have had their teething troubles – don’t cling to these and hold them up like a penalty card at each other for years later. Change, and appreciate change in the other.

Focus on core competencies: Whether it’s parenting, financial management, looking after elders, a career, hospitality…everyone has their speciality – that they’re good at and do with ease. Find it and focus on it. And do try to stop berating each other for what you are not. In this exercise, you’ll find that you’ll do away with much dust and rust and many of the original facets for which you loved each other will emerge.

So many people, when faced with the task of spring cleaning and overhauling their marriages, feel most resentful and say: “If I can’t be comfortable around my own house and spouse – what’s the point.” Comfort is one thing, and neglect and sloth is quite another. And let’s learn to make that distinction! Many relationships are comfortable – ‘like an old shoe’, as people say. But do remember, that an old shoe becomes comfortable because you’ve used it well, you didn’t drag it through muck or leave it neglected under a whole pile of things, you repaired it when required…and you chose good material to begin with. It’s something like that with a marriage – it can flourish on comfort, but it just cannot thrive on neglect and abuse.

There’s a saying in hindi – chalti ka naam gaadi. Loosely translated, this means, if it runs, it’s a car. Don’t let your marriage be one of those. Inertia never got anyone anywhere !

(appears in marathi translation in this year's Kalnirnay calendar!)

To the exclusion of all else

Friendships and relationships


Why is it that many people simply drop their friendships or ‘push them to the back of the cupboard’ once they get married or enter a man-woman relationship? It often happens, that when a boyfriend comes into the picture, young women quite routinely neglect or even dump their girl friends. And worse, they may dig out these friends suddenly, only when the boyfriend is unavailable for any reason, or if the relationship breaks up.
This narrow vision of things is not restricted to only the young. Mature, grown men and women too tend to let many special friendships and affections simply lapse and fall by the wayside, once they have a partner. And only when the spouse is out of town or busy, are the friends remembered.
To some extent this is natural – your time with your friends is reduced, as you choose to spend more time exclusively with your partner. However, it seems to be such a pity that many of us assume that the two are almost mutually exclusive: either you can have a relationship, or you can have friends! This need not be so at all, and in fact is a rather restricted way of relating to the world around you.
In fact, concentrating wholly and over-focusing on a relationship, to the exclusion of all other relationships, can be emotionally unhealthy for both people concerned. When a woman cuts out the casual ease and special charm of spending time with her girl/woman friends and family, she tends to want far too much to come out of the one relationship that she concentrates on: that with her boyfriend or spouse. Obviously, this puts a great strain on the relationship, since now the expectations become unrealistic – she wants to shop, dine, chat, plan, study, travel, watch films…and take part in a host of activities only with one person, for which he has to be available to her. Moreover, she expects him, and now only him, to understand her every mood, her anxieties, her hopes. She also expects him to be, at all times, the happy ‘recipient’ of all her love and affection, and for him to ‘be there’ for her in the same single-minded fashion.
Surely this is an unrealistic expectation, and one that is bound to not be met fully. He may be busy at times, or interested in other activities, or may simply not want to be in this constantly one-on-one mode with the girlfriend/spouse. When that happens, she wrongly identifies it as: “he doesn’t love me” or “he’s not giving enough”. Many men too take this stance, expecting the woman in their lives to simply drop all other friendships and family ties or to give them minimal attention.
While this may seem very cozy and loving in the beginning of a relationship, it is far healthier to have a broad band of relationships, which touch upon different aspect of your personality and your social and emotional needs. This way, you can be sure that you don’t put an unnecessary and unrealistic burden on your spouse or partner and also continue to cherish and nurture your relationships with other loved ones.
Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut's words sum it up perfectly:
“Let us talk about divorce …when we do it we will very likely wrangle and wail and weep formlessly about money and sex, about treachery, about outgrowing one another, about how close love is to hate, and so on. Nobody ever gets anywhere near close to the truth: the nuclear family doesn’t provide nearly enough companionship. …
“….I am going to write a play about the breakup of a marriage. And at the end of the play I am going to have a character say what people should say to each other in real life at the end of a marriage: Im sorry, you being human, need a hundred affectionate and like-minded companions. Im only one person. I tried, but I could never be a hundred people to you. You’ve tried but you could never be a hundered people to me. Too bad. Good bye.
“….Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces. So I recommend that everybody join all sorts of organisations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life.

GOURI DANGE
THE WRITER IS A PRACTISING FAMILY COUNSELLOR and author of 3 Zakia Mansion and ABCs of Parenting and The Counsel of Strangers

In sickness and in alternative therapies

or

The Art of Leaving People Alone

“My wife is a workshopaholic,” says Monish, explaining yet again his wife’s absence at an extended-family reunion. People around titter, but Monish is, for the most part, not joking. Shipra is attending her 9th workshop of the year (and it’s only March) – this time it’s one on pranic healing, or past-life regression, or artistic yoga, or whatever. No one’s knocking-mocking any therapies here; it’s the serial flirtation with every shade of self-discovery/awareness workshop that’s getting to Monish.
Barely does the dust settle after one particular kind of churning or self-exploratory archaeological khoj, that promises to reveal layer after unconscious layer, and Shipra’s off on the next one. Why is this a problem for a spouse who is otherwise a much-admired ‘enabler’ of his wife’s many endeavours? For several reasons.

First, the search-for-self agenda means that Shipra spends serious time absent from the marriage. At 43 and 39 this shouldn’t be a huge problem, Monish tells himself, as do some of his friends and Shipra’s fellow-searchers. But the fact remains that he misses her presence – often at dinner, at public places, in just everyday situations. And he has little scope to say this without being labeled a non-enabling spouse, MCP (remember that antiquated catch-all phrase? – it can still be trotted out), and clinger.

Second, it’s a problem because, as Monish puts it, “Every time she returns from one of these jamborees, I’m supposed to change.” Sounds funny, but again, he’s not joking. He’s feeling seriously beleaguered. This is how it pans out, each time: Even before the learnings from whatever new workshop she’s attended really sink in and she has herself internalized them or put them into even tentative practice, Shipra’s on his case to change something about himself ‘for the better’. It’s almost like she has a new whip in her hand, and the rest of the family (which is Monish, because their teenaged kids won’t put up with it) has to learn new tricks. It’s to do with diet, or breathing patterns, or water intake, or thought processes, or choice of words, or ways of worship, or sleeping cycles, or relationships with people, or a range of behaviours that come under the microscope and are found wanting, thanks to Workshop No. 118 and counting. Monish played along for a while, first for the novelty of it, then to try and stay on the same page as her, and finally to keep the peace.

Third, the workshopaholic thing has become a problem because whatever new therapy/philosophy/system is on the cards, Shipra needs to practice it with the fervour of the new convert. So overnight, life as Monish knows it changes. From certain foods getting banned, to internal home structures being changed, to colours, to drinks, to eat-sleep times…you get the picture.

Now before everyone thinks – ah, this Shipra is just a contrary cow, and why’re we wasting time talking about some nut-job babe and why doesn’t he just dump her, do note: a) there are plenty of men doing this kind of a thing too, insistently dragging spouses along on whatever jagged journey they’re on; and b) Shipra isn’t a nut-job really. There’s a genuine search somewhere there, a struggle; it’s just that it has been misfocused out of recognition, what with the world around us having turned into a Great Mall of Healing Therapies or some such. And this has engendered an army of half-baked healees who’re in a hurry to uncork the healing stuff and spread it around. It’s almost as if, the faster you enlist your spouse/family, the more instant your nirvana.

But the truth is that real quests rarely involve finding quick converts or making life difficult for people around you with your esoteric and high-maintenance regimens. That is at best faddist and at worst cultist behaviour.

What is someone in Monish’s situation to do? Difficult question. Obviously, besides playing along, he’s also tried protesting, or inserting some humour into the situation, or doggedly not co-operating. And he has seen that they’re possibly headed to leading lives on parallel tracks, or worse, divergent ones. Do they need help? Yes. Preferably from someone outside, who will be able to point out to Shipra that she, among other things, needs to leave Monish be. And that the phrase in the marriage vows was: ‘in sickness and in health’ - not ‘in sickness and in alternative therapies’.

GOURI DANGE

Party Animals

How do you couple?

In party season, the focus is on clothes, dates, who invited whom, who goes out with whom, and all the usual blah. It’s also a very good time to take a measure of how you ‘couple’ in a large group. A party working for you or not isn’t wholly dependent on what the host laid out, the music, who came, and how long it went on. How the two of you entered, stayed, and exited – these are silently operating issues, actually. It’s not the late nights and overeating and traffic wrestle that really gets you down during the party season. That’s just the physical stuff, nothing that can’t be fixed with a range of hair-of-a-dog remedies, a day of fasting, detox foods, an aspirin, not getting out of bed, a swim, or whatever it is that restores your tissues. It’s the unhealthy ways that couples treat each other at a party that really messes them up. Here are some markers; seven species of party animals that need to see the vet:
The strider-ahead. This is one half of the couple who, on arriving at the venue, simply jumps out of the car and makes his/her way to the party without waiting for the other half to park, or get out, adjust clothes, fall in step, or anything. Just gets out and strides on, leaving the other half to trail behind or hurry after them. Not a good sign. Your other half might be putting up with it, has even got used to it, but it’s boorish and self-absorbed. And speaks of a deeper malaise in your relationship. Sad and joyless.
The abandoner. This couple, either both, or one of them, enters together, but each promptly heads off in different directions. They maintain no connection with each other throughout, not even eye contact, really. You don’t have to be constantly intertwined, but it’s nice to converge, diverge, converge, diverge through the evening…you get the point. Abandoners are not fighting. They’re either in a blah relationship, or they’ve got no concept of being a couple or enjoying each other’s company amongst people. Bad enough if you’re both doing this; much worse if one of you does it and the other is left to fend for his/herself the best they can. Boorish and neglectful.
The intertwined inseparable. Either by mutual consent, or because one of them is a clinger, this couple behaves like Siamese twins, joined at the hip, or hand. They’re signaling their coupledom with a vengeance, and the party is mainly a showcase for their absorption with each other. They never dance with anyone else, and they talk about each other, themselves, and hang around with other such fused couples, at the most. Soppy and uninteresting.
The possessor and re-posessor. These are couple who do let each other go off on their own for a bit, but one of them will keep a sharp eye out for the other, and if he/she spots the other half talking animatedly to anyone else, will smilingly cut in, massage shoulders, kiss, nuzzle, and generally ‘reclaim’ what is ‘theirs’. Claustrophobic and creepy.
The taunter and arguer. These people’s idea of fun is to keep saying semi-nasty stuff about their other half. While it may be fun for a while, people around tire of this passive aggression. Taunts include references to old fights, flames, and other fatuous facts that other people don’t get, but are enough to make everyone uncomfortable. Arguers will interrupt the other half mid-sentence to clarify some pointless point like “no darling, it was the LA-SFO flight you missed, not the LA-Houston one” or some such. If the other half is an arguer too, they’ll debate this threadbare while your beer gets tepid. Annoying and boring.
The late leaver. This is a couple for whom the party is over at totally different times. One of them will simply ignore the fact that the other has had enough and wants to go home. Having got used to this, possibly on a regular basis, the tired one will sit resentfully and/or resignedly somewhere, having drunk, danced, eaten and ready to leave. The other half will be still wading through his/her drink or meal; the hosts too are looking worn round the edges, but the late leaver will have none of it. He/she will leave only when good and ready. Tiresome and frustrating.
The shrinking hassler. The opposite or counterpart of the late leaver, this person has come to the party under duress, sits around looking uncomfortable and aggrieved, off and on hassles the other half to ‘let’s go’, and generally becomes everyone else’s problem too, as people try to entertain and draw her/him in. Dull and depressing.
Spot your style in the profiles above, and see if you can fix it before the New Year is out.
GOURI DANGE

Too much togetherness

The exclusivity trap

“Too much togetherness” my grandmother used to say, nodding grimly at the young couples that she saw in the eighties and nineties (when she herself was in her eighties and nineties). She knew a little English, but what she knew she used with great effect.
Couples in her generation didn’t believe in, or perhaps didn’t have the opportunity, to do too much together. Progressively, in the last some decades, we’ve been led to believe that just about everything important that you must do and like to do, should be done with your spouse. That includes a huge range of activities, from brushing teeth to spending all leisure time together. At the physical level, there is now a horrible insistence that intimacy includes that we share a room, a bed and a loo at all times. Even when we can afford not to. Somehow this defines coupledom. And yet, like many people experience it, there is nothing compelling and cosy really about being up close and personal with the spouse’s gargles, burps, snorning, shaving, flatulence, flossing, tossing noisily in bed, wanting or not-wanting the fan/ac and so on and so overintimately forth. Why does being a couple per force mean all this stuff? I’m not talking here about creating some mysterious misty mystique around yourself night and day. Just talking about sparing each other the overacquaintance with your bodily functions.

Most couples, even those in awful, angry, bored, or banal marriages, insist on sleeping a foot away from each other and being privy to each other’s bathroom routines. Even those doing well in their marriages do it. Not because they particularly love to, but because that’s how everyone does it. Maybe in the first year or so of marriage it’s great fun to get to be around each other’s little quirks and routines, but a word of warning: it’s not a good idea at all. Not if you can afford to insert some space between each other, especially in the bathroom-toilet routine. Possibly even separate rooms. Imagine never having to discuss who left footprints in the bathroom, who left the floor wet, who didn’t put the cap on the toothpaste, who ate too many beans, whose cupboard is disgusting, who dumps jewellery where, and other such issues that seem to take up overwhelming amounts of couple time and even eat into affection and attractiveness.

So much for physical too-much-togetherness. The other area is our insistence that all our emotional and social needs be fulfilled by our partner. No wonder so many couples find each other wanting, and show up at counsellors’ clinics with a feeling that they’re mismatched. Well of course you’re mismatched if you’re insisting that your spouse and only your spouse be, besides your partner and co-parent, also: friend, philosopher, guide, punching bag, shopping buddy, gossiper, spring-cleaner, movie-watcher, agony aunt/uncle, office politics discusser, walking companion, movie watcher, food explorer, fellow trekker, bird-watcher, and so on and so unrealistically forth. In granny’s days, and perhaps just a generation ago, this simply wasn’t part of the job description of being a spouse. So the ‘we’re so different’ whine was much less heard.

Of course you’re different. Whoever defined marriage as this kind of stencil and carbon-copy match of two people, has clearly got it all mixed up. Young marriages would do much better if someone told them – hey, it’s ok, in fact it’s great, if you have different pursuits, and more importantly, different people to pursue them with. Not just the occasional boys’/girls’ night out, but a consistent investment in important and abiding friendships and family relationships from which you draw very different things. So that you can continue to get from your spouse/partner the things that originally attracted you in the first place. So that both of you can grow and intersect only in areas that you choose to. So that your marriage/partnership doesn’t boil down to lists and growing lists of what is missing, what you expected, what needs to be fixed and other such soul-sapping shoulds and shouldn’ts. Younger couples, particularly, beware. And older ones too. And even old-old ones. Despite what the movie hype and stereotype tells you, dovetailing your life with someone else’s doesn’t automatically mean giving up on friends, siblings, colleagues, interests, and in the end your individuality.
Gouri Dange
(THE WRITER IS A PRACTISING FAMILY COUNSELLOR WHO HAS A BATHROOM ALL TO HERSELF)

The Intimacy Phobic

Urban Indian women watch Sex in the City with the kind of devotion earlier reserved for Ally MacBeal. The Diary of Bridgette Jones sells, the sequel sells, and the movie sells some more; and it’s not just for Hugh Grant blinkity-blink-blinking his eyes in lieu of acting. What women are connecting with, mainly, is the amazingly spot-on portrayal of the long and seemingly endless supply of intimacy-phobic men that these women encounter – again and again. In another day and age these chaps may have been dismissed as cads, bounders, or simply a-hs. Today, as a 33-year-old single woman in Mumbai says, “They seem to be all we got.”
To set the record straight here and get one thing out of the way: do note that the intimacy-phobic man doesn’t necessarily baulk at having sex with a woman. That he will usually take where he finds. But if the woman involved mistakes this for a deepening of the relationship, that’s where the trouble begins. She usually wants follow-up phone calls, perhaps an affectionate, intimate reference to the fact that they’ve had sex, and if they’re having it regularly, then godforbid, even a meet-the-family-and-friends kind of evening. And then, somewhere along the way, when she realizes he’s behaving like a fugitive, but does show up at the remotest places if there’s some nooky on the cards, she phones-a-friend, usually a woman friend and has a long chat. The words bastard and asshole may feature in their conversation.
One intimacy-phobic 38-year-old man speaks for them all, when he says defensively: “Ah come on, I take what is made available to me.” And here’s the crux. What he and his brethren, his entire jaat-jamaat, have learnt to see as ‘available’ is only what they choose to see, not what is really available.
Follow the logic closely here: Most women, when they enter a sexually intimate deal (yup it is a gender-differentiated thing, whichever way you slice it), are also making available, waiting in the wings, all eagerly queued up, a host of non-sexual tender and intimate parts of themselves and their lives: a listening ear, a cosy meal, a tidy room, intelligent convo, Scrabble or some such, some whining about their own pushy moms, dinner out in a public place, a stroll, an invitation to a favourite nephew’s birthday/navjyot/graduation/shaadi …you get the picture.
The intimacy-phobic, however, chooses to completely ‘not see’ that this is available. Or if he does see it, in his mind the woman is then instantly transformed into some kind of Venus fly-trap, hungrily opening and shutting her cloying, devouring jaws - being pushy, marriage-driven, grabbing, controlling, and over-reading into what was ‘after all just some fun’ between them.
The man who has trouble with this larger intimacy of a relationship, is what is also called love-avoidant. In fact, the man is so chronically love-avoidant, that he shrivels like a salted slug at the use of the word ‘love’ even in the phrase ‘love-avoidant’ – this is the experience of many counsellors who work with couples, potential couples and couples in which the man is desperately pretending not to be a couple.
That’s another diagnostic thing too: an intimacy-phobic man will never call what he has going ‘a relationship’ in the first place. He will doggedly stick to words like ‘friend’ and if pushed badly and really squirming, may even bestow the honour of ‘best friend’ on the woman. (At this point, the woman’s having another phone convo with her girl friend in her head, in which the words bastard and asshole may feature.) If further challenged, the man will then trot out some antique, dusty theory involving biology, in which men and women are forever locked in chased and chaser mode and he has the genes to prove it, etc.
But what’s really at work, to put it in psycho-socio-babble, is this: The intimacy-phobic is a chap who has been ‘crippled’ by family and/or culture. If there is a history of enmeshment with one of the parents, often the mother, in which the boy was used as a hero child, performer, confidant, or the eternal baby, then the relationship was one in which the child was there to service the parent's needs, not the other way around. And that's what kicks into place every time a woman makes any kind of one-on-one demand on his affections, dare we say love. To put it in English: This is a man who can't distinguish between being close to someone and being eaten up alive.
Just like diabetes has reached epidemic proportions, intimacy-phobia has become endemic in the male urban population. Some of them will seek cures and possibly break out by daring to engage in genuine and tender relationships with women who won’t eat them up alive. Others will hobble along, and drag a few good women with them along the road for a while, but will never really connect. And yet others will actually encounter their nightmares by tangling misguidedly with women who will, under the gloss, be controlling, needy, deranged, demanding…so be afraid, be very afraid.
GOURI DANGE

Pati Patni aur Woe

There is nothing new under the Sun, they say. And in the realm of affairs, illicit (and dangerous) liaisons, eternal triangles and heartache, there really seems to be little that hasn’t been done already.

Yet everyone who comes along thinks that theirs is a unique situation that needs a one-of-its-kind solution. And that somehow it will come out different. Agony Aunt (and Uncle) columns, shrink’s couches and counsellor’s rooms have for decades echoed with questions like the one below:

I am a 22-year-old girl in love with a 30-year-old married man for the past 3 years. He says that he has a very bad marriage and I too have been witness to tiffs between him and his wife. However, recently I found out that his wife is pregnant for the second time. When I asked him about it he said that it was a mistake. He has promised to marry me within a year. I don't know what to believe. What should I do?

Amazing. Questions like this used to be asked in long-gone magazines like Eve’s Weekly, decades ago. And there are people still asking them. Of course the pain for each person going through stuff like this is real, palpable, and unique. But somehow one can’t help wonder why, while the human race spends millions of dollars on avoiding pain and inconvenience, on some counts we simply will not develop and modify. You’d think people would learn that certain things are such cliché, well-established no-nos, guaranteed to cause hideous self-harm and are best avoided. But no. We all got to make our own mistakes. (And worse, write soppy prose, bad poetry and awful film scripts about it, even).

Get this: This young woman who asks this question, has got her whole life in front of her, and yet she thinks she has only two choices: a) getting tied down to a guy who ditches a wife and baby that was conceived when he was supposed to be having a bad marriage and investing in a new relationship, or b) getting strung along by this chap while he makes more ‘mistakes’ and these mistakes grow up, go through school, college and marriage, while this side-show girl waits around being told that he’ll marry her ‘next year’.

And this girl actually believes she should wait around holding her breath to see the outcome of this scenario, and where she fits in.
It’s Waiting for Godot without even the humour and sophistication of absurd theatre and any of the soul-searching of existential angst.

As for this ustaad guy, this bad-marriage boyfriend and his ilk. Where’s he coming from? His idea of a bad marriage is to get his wife pregnant and then tell this girl it was a ‘mistake’. There’s nothing new under the Sun there too. Sounds like your everyday or garden variety of confused and/or callous guy down the ages.

He’s usually armed with lots of rationalizations in place for the dishonesty and for inflicting loads of hurt all round in his ‘confusion’. Plenty of ploys, premises and philosophical constructs about why he’s doing this. Also, he’s equipped with Neanderthal theories about how men need to march to some ancient and primal drum-beat that involves spreading sperm farthest and widest in furthering the interests of the species, and hence the wandering detours from the marriage. He’s also got a neat hierarchy in the head: “my wife is the mother of my children so I will do nothing to rock that boat”. Public figures, great showmen, corporate biggies, and ordinary guys have all done it. The promises, the double life, the “I’m finding myself; the I can’t desert my wife, but it’s you I love”. Nothing new under the Sun.

And then there’s the third player in this well-worn drama too. Takes three to tango here. The wife who abuse accommodates. (For those who came in late: abuse doesn’t simply mean being slapped around, yelled at and such like; it comes in the form of being disrespected, neglected, and being lied to too). This person writes her own script and dialogues, believing, again, that hers is a unique situation, and she has no real choices. We’ve all heard the lines before: “but he’s good to the children”; “he can’t help it”; “where can I go”; “I’m staying for the kids”; “I know he really loves and respects me.”

It’s all been scripted and enacted before. Several times over. And yet there are new players – one born every minute, looks like.

And the play will go on, as long as there are a combination of these three protagonists: Pati, with an elastic and patchy sense of commitment; Patni, who decides that the bottomline is that at least she gets to be main squaw; and Woh, who settles for being main squeeze.


Gouri Dange

Over and done with

That most-bearable lightness of being

“When you really get over someone, it feels as right and healthy as a great bowel movement,” a 34-year-old man said. Nobody guffawed or said yukk. From the murmur of agreement, it was obvious that many present knew precisely the joys of a decisively well-emptied bowel as well as the relief of getting an entire person out of one’s system. Someone said it cleared the head, someone said it made your stomach feel empty and ready to receive better things, someone else said it relaxed your muscles but gave you that inner lightness…some of them were talking about the bowel thing and others were talking about the getting-over thing.

Someone else then quoted graffiti from a Nigel Rees collection: “There’s nothing as underrated as a good s**t and overrated as a bad f**k.”
Wow. Again, no one laughed; some just looked shocked; others nodded musingly as they turned that construct over in their minds.

The conversation then briefly took on an intricate gastrointestinal turn: It was generally agreed that there are two ways by which one has a great bowel movement: one, by shocking the system with some manner of purgative, and getting everything out, all at one go; and two, by consistently providing the system the right food and exercise, and regulating the digestive track to be healthy, wealthy and wise. The first way works, but depletes your digestive track of many good things – a kind of throwing out of the baby with the bath water, excuse the gross mixing of metaphors. The second way is kinder on your system, and ensures a real on-going state of digestive well-being.

It’s something like that when it comes to getting over someone too. After the split, the falling apart, the tears and genuine hurt, too many people try to quickly suck it all up and move on with a vengeance. They go in for purgative measures like plunging feverishly into work, a new rebound relationship, badmouthing the ex, throwing away all traces of his/her existence from their life, going ‘good-riddance’, recasting the old relationship as some stupid inconsequential interlude, and so on and so unconvincingly forth.

No wonder, then, that no real getting over and moving on happens. In the silence of the night, you suffer from the insidious and insistent reflux of undigested hurt. Worse, these acidic burps from the past bring home the undodgeable fact that you’re still actively mired in the old relationship; and perhaps that’s why your heart’s not really in that new job/lover/vacation/hobby/make-over. ‘Mired in the old relationship’ does not necessarily mean that you’re still in love. It means that your self-worth, even world-view, is still connected to the ex. And all the more, if the ex has been the one to call off the relationship. A neurotic and silent shadow-relationship continues to exist. It’s as if you’re running your current life and its events and people past the ex, as also tracking how the ex’s life is going. If he/she has moved on and is with someone else or seems happy (or unhappy), all of this impacts you, and causes your carefully constructed new life to pale into insignificance in an instant. And that’s when your realize with a dull thud in your heart (or whichever part of the body registers your plight), that your drastic purge measures have simply not worked.

Better, then, to get on to a systematic getting-over-someone programme. If you’re fortunate enough to have one of those better-put-together psyches, it happens quite naturally, and one day you wake up with the sure inner knowledge that the person’s really and truly passed out of your system. But most of us have to work at it.

Step 1: It’s that much-tossed-around word (entire seminars and workshops happen around this word): Forgiveness. No, not forgiving as in ‘come back, step all over me, all is forgiven’. That’s not forgiveness at all. Too many people bristle at the idea of forgiving an ex lover/spouse/parent/sibling/whoever. Because they assume that the suggestion that they forgive, is the suggestion that they ‘patch up’ and forget that anything bad happened and thereby indicate that they’re up for more abuse/misuse. Not true, though. Forgiveness is not reconciliation.

While reconciliation could and does happen only after forgiving, it does not and need not automatically follow. Forgiveness means simply dropping it. Just letting it go. It is a self-contained act, not a stepping-stone, not a capitulation, and certainly not a sign of being a wuss-needy-loser. Forgiveness magically and gently eliminates the toxic gunk of regret, anger, and vengeful thoughts from your system. And the best part is, you don’t need the ex to be around, you don’t need words or a script. Because forgiveness is not a dialogue at all. It is not even a soliloquy. It is a state. It acknowledges that some things are not to be, for reasons you may never fathom, and then it magically pulls the plug on the past, and neutralizes all that acid. It frees up mind-body space for some real loving.
There are no Steps 2, 3, 4… Get Step 1 right, and that’s it. Guaranteed to give you that well-moved-bowel lightness of being.

GOURI DANGE
(THE WRITER IS A PRACTISING FAMILY COUNSELLOR WITH HEALTHY BOWELS)

After the affair

After the Fall

So you screwed up. You did what is high up there, right on top of the list of screwing up in a marriage. You wandered. You wandered with no intention of going anywhere too far off. You basically took a detour, for a change of scenery. And then you got found out and you lurched back on to the road, strewing mutilated bodies all around, including yours, your wife’s, the other woman’s, and your kids’ (and don’t b.s. yourself that your kids didn’t catch on, they always do; they just keep their nose out of it, keep a low profile and hope that somehow it will all go away; but oh, they know when mom and dad are inflicting collateral damage.)
Now, somehow, you and your wife/significant other have managed to put it behind you and carry on. But it’s a bumpy ride, and sometimes it feels plain unsafe – like you’re riding with a consignment of temperamental hand grenades in the back of the car. Yes, you’re both keeping on driving ahead, but that’s about it. It doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t feel safe. And you’re wondering if this is how the rest of your married life is going to be.
So pull over for a minute.
Remember there’s a sequence in which you need to repair the damage, and only then really do you move ahead, together. It’s a little like when you get a flat tire. When you change tires, you simply have to maintain the sequence, and if you miss out any of the steps, you have all kinds of problems, major and minor, which force you off the road later. The jack has to be squarely placed, the handbrake has to be up, the four loosened nuts have to be kept carefully aside where you can find them (novices loose sight of them in the dirt), the spare has to be taken out (and that nut-bolt kept carefully). When you fit the spare tire, the bolts have to be not just put back, you have to tighten them securely, or they’re known to come off and cause bizarre accidents and fatalities. Then your tool kit has to go back where it belongs. Many drivers are known to, in the rush of relief at having changed the tire successfully, simply drive off, leaving essentials behind on the road. A little later, there’s the flat tire in your boot to be fixed, as soon as possible. The number of people who drive around with a flat tire as their spare is not funny. That’s the kind of invisible reckless driving that will do you in one day.
And what’s all this got to do with having an affair and patching up with your wife/significant other? Essentially this: in your hurry and relief at quickly getting back to ‘normal’ after the shit hits the fan, don’t miss out some essential steps that you simply have to go through, to ensure that you really make up and move ahead, together.
So here’s a brief manual of must-dos after the affair. Actually there are separate His and Hers manuals. (Ya,ya, I know having an extra-marital affair is not a male prerogative, and women have stormed that bastion too, but here I’m talking about straying men only; modify the instructions for yourself if you’ve got the reverse situation on your hands.)

His:
After you’ve said sorry, don’t walk away from the emotional stuff. ‘Admitting’ and ‘saying sorry’ are just the beginning of mending. Be there, work at fixing things that caused the drift in the first place, listen, talk. Don’t throw the ‘How many times do you want me to say I’m sorry?’ line. Because it’s not about how many times, it’s about how you’re sorry.
However, don’t become abject. Hold on to your dignity. Not arrogance or defiance, but dignity. Big difference. This means, that in your rush to make it ok, don’t become the resident whipping boy, who can be summoned to discuss the affair at any time of the day or night. However much you screwed up, you have many rights intact. So don’t take counter-abuse. Far too many men, after the episode, accept a life-long sentence in the dog house. This includes having to give up on things that were important to them, eroding of their authority/place with the kids, unavailability of basic courtesies, intimacy, etc.
Cut out the gifts. They don’t work. They just smell of hush-money. Her accepting them doesn’t mean she’s in forgiving mode. For years later they’ll sit around reminding her of ‘that time’. Just gift your time and your energies; re-invest in the relationship, not in expensive carbon and cruises.
Never joke about it. Not today, not never, not ever. The affair is not in the humour domain. Not even black humour.


Hers:
Demand answers, but do try not to go for the details. Ask why, because that will help you both to understand what to mend. But drop the how, where, how many times and other perverse minutiae that you’re tempted to get into. Mapping that stuff harms you, harms him, and nothing comes of it except a scab-pulling kind of pleasure.
Maintain your own dignity. Get a woman or man friend or a counsellor to help you on this one. Don’t try to sort it all out via the offending husband. Weeping fits, tantrums, cold white silences, all of them are totally understandable, but they don’t have to be in front of him at all times.
Don’t use genuine making-up and forgiveness time to simply make hay. Far too many women use this period to extract unrealistic promises, gifts, subtle power shifts, and all kinds of ultimately useless ‘privileges’.
Never joke about it. Not today, not never, not ever. The affair is not in the humour domain. Not even black humour.


For him and her: After an emotional accident of this kind, get down to mending and tending your marriage. Don’t just drive on fast and furiously without putting the nuts and bolts back in place.

GOURI DANGE

Who not to call

The Ex Files
or
Who not to call and why


Booty call. It once meant calling up someone you know purely for a one-night (or day or twilight or whatever) stand, no strings attached. But the phrase has expanded to take in a more complex and perhaps ultimately more troublesome kind of phone calls that people make: the phone call to an ex. It’s not the same as a call that split-up couples make to exchange logistical information about children/pets/accounts and other tangled responsibilities. Neither is it a call to mouth off in the you creep I wish I’d never met you vein.
It’s a call that someone, oddly, makes even after they’ve moved on, embraced a new life – possibly in a new city, with a new significant other/spouse, perhaps produced more children/pets. Or they may be in the middle of pursuing some new path, full of all kinds of new demands, which include getting to know and fit into the unpredictable, unfamiliar contours of some new potential partner. Which is all very fresh and energizing and all that, and yet, one fine day, none of it makes much sense, because all the new stuff or the complete absence of it, is suddenly very tiresome to deal with, and your weary, trying-hard mind floats off to a time when you had more familiar, well-worn problems to deal with. Or your mind, badly needing a rest, simply skips past earlier bad times and jumps right back to the good stuff that you and the ex shared. Or perhaps you’ve painted yourself into a lonely little corner, not rushed to make new connections, and you’re missing the comfort of getting together at a restaurant that virtually has your and your ex’s butt shape etched on the seats at the corner table and you both predictably and boringly (but now it seems so comfortingly) ordered invariably the same things and bitched and moaned to each other about other couples, your sister, or the universe in general and felt a little smug about yourselves.
But here’s the catch. When you call an ex, or are called by one, it is highly unlikely that both of you are in the same emotional or situational circumstance. For instance, one day, Jagdeep got a booty call from his ex-wife who’d moved out of the marriage and into the hills a whole year earlier. Stories about how she was living an idyll filtered through to him, and he was sort of ok with that, though sometimes felt horribly left out of a picture that once they’d painted together. But when she called one day in tears about a panther picking up a hillside dog, too close for comfort on her forest-touching property, he could only wonder, and said it out loud: “Why’re you calling me? What am I supposed to do from 180 km away? Go call one of your forest-dweller pals or a ranger.”
His wife Gargi hadn’t called up for him to do something at all. She says she called because the event had so shaken her that she’d almost ‘automatically’ called someone she connected with an earlier, safer, less unpredictable time. “All I wanted was someone to say something like: ‘how terrifying; maybe you need to kennel your dogs at night; maybe you need to fence the property better’.” But Jagdeep’s detached response cured her instantly of any residual emotional dependence on him. “I think he almost got a kick out of giving me that ‘why’re you calling me’ number. I guess I should have called a friend and not an ex, right?”
Right.
“Sometimes you call an ex when you realize that you’re probably headed to die alone,” says Kamaal, hiding the hurt in that realization behind a pretend-bluntness. When he turned 59 and had spent the previous 8 years looking high and low for a new abiding relationship, it hit him that perhaps everything that he believed constituted his charms –a terrific sense of humour, decent finances, a body in great shape, an ability and inclination to treat women well – simply hadn’t amounted to new partnership material, for some reason. “At that time I was low, not mellow, as I imagined I’d be nearing 60…just low. And that’s when I tried to get back in touch with my ex-wife for a drink, perhaps a long evening together, perhaps more… Yeh aakhari shamme hi bujhanay kay liye, aaa I wanted to tell her. But she kindly brushed me off, and I hope didn’t dine out on the story.”
Sometimes a booty call works out – both parties concerned meet up, spend an okayish time together, and scurry back to their new lives, highly relieved that they are so through with each other in every which way. But that’s a rare occurrence, best left to the experts – people who’ve really got their current stuff together, totally. It’s an exercise that should not be tried out by novices and amateurs, though.

GOURI DANGE
(The writer is a family counselor and maintains some ex-files too.)

Home Improvement

External upheavals and makeovers mask the internal state of affairs


“Sorry dahling, can you speak up? I can’t hear a thing. We’ve got workmen in the house.”
“We’d love to see you, but the entire flooring has been pulled up and we’re jumping from sofa to chair, to table.”
“We’re re-doing the bathroom and we just can’t agree on the colours. I’ve got this plumber standing on my head, yaar.”

We’ve all heard these, and variations on these. It’s the sound of urban Indian homes and families re-inventing themselves. Two intriguing things are operating here.

One, we’ve all been sold the idea that our homes must at all times look like the insides of hotels – granite, big-fat drapes, state-of-the-art potties, wall ‘treatments’ and that whole caboodle. If you’re part of the minimalist, muted set, then it’s some exotic and utterly unserviceable stone for your floor that stains even if your dog sneezes on it, and pits if you drop a pencil on it

Depending on whether you’re ostentatious or minimalist, classic or futuristic, your windows could be ‘dressed’ in layers and yardage. You can have drapes and then ‘sheers’ – the negligee of the seductive home. What a great idea. This way you can discuss two sets of curtains endlessly, two sets of curtain rods endlessly, two textures endlessly…you get the point.

As for kitchens, the opportunities for reinvention are endless. Surfaces, accessories – whether you drink or not, a bar set; whether you eat meat or not you, a bewildering array of knives, hatchets, machetes and mallets. Endless areas to discuss and dispute.

Lighting offers endless scope. You have to rip out every fixture that you have, and bring in new stuff; those stained glass shades you hankered for a year ago, whose merits you discussed to death when you bought them, are too common now. The enormous production of Japanese paper that you bought now looks like a very rumpled and badly made pyjama leg standing in the corner of the room, so hat has to go too…

With new stone, fabric, tile, fittings, wood finishes, paints, coming in every day, you can re-do your house, sit down exhausted to a cup of tea when all the workmen have left, and instantly start eyeing areas that need even more remodeling and updating. You’re on the refashioning treadmill, and there’s no way you can get off.

So much for home improvement helping you to sound terribly toney, always in the throes of remodeling. But there is often a darker agenda at work in homes that are being perennially and frantically redone. I strongly suspect (as do psychologists around the world) that ‘doing the house up’ has become the perfect camouflage for a wobbly marriage/dysfunctional family life. You can also put all other relationships on hold, while you’re redoing the house, talking only masonry, carpentry, plumbing at your friends, who can count you out of any more nuanced and dimensional interaction, during this time.

The whole home improvement exercise neatly mimics the real thing, i.e.: home-making and relationship building or remodeling. You can have mock disagreements and mock conversations, and mock harmony too – while you urgently and thoroughly debate choices.

And in the safety of rubble, dust, noise, and workmen, you can hide and avoid looking at everything that is really wrong with your life and that needs attention. Pressing decisions like what colour of tapestry you have to buy, which wash-basin proclaims your trendiness, and whether you want granamite rather than marbonite (or some such) come up everyday, every hour, while your home is being done. This provides you and your spouse with breakfast, lunch and dinner conversations, and possibly outings to the home décor shops for many months. What better than the sound of stone cutting, masonry and carpentry to drown out the sounds of your inner needs.

Perhaps this was best depicted in a wonderful story-telling device used in the film Lost in Translation. The state of the main character’s (Bill Murray) marriage is made evident to us by the film-maker (Sofia Coppola) in a tangential way. His wife is never shown on screen; throughout the film, she is just a voice we hear on the phone, making trans-Atlantic calls to urgently consult her husband on whether teal and beige is a good combination for the bathroom, and whether he has made a decision yet about the curtains for his study from the swatches she’s sent him.


Gouri Dange
(The writer is a practicing family counsellor with a slightly shabby home.)

Mysterious Goings-On

Some minor but nagging questions; some possible answers.

There are several questions that float up into ones consciousness every now and then, but they’re usually relegated to the back-burner, because finding answers to them is not a priority. They aren’t pressing questions. They don’t involve soul-searching. The answers to them, if found, will not make you go ‘ahaa’; nor will the questions haunt you beyond the grave. There is no metaphysical angle to them and they do not challenge the frontiers of human thought. But yes, they do tend to skulk around at the back of your mind, and come up to trouble you every now and then, like that tiny stem of coriander (or ‘cilantro’, if you’re one of those fancy cookbook writers) stuck stubbornly between your last two teeth, way back in your mouth. Till one day, when you have a brief break from the pressing questions of life, you turn your mind to contemplating and possibly resolving these not-so-pressing but niggling, nagging ones. You follow through your urge to figure them out, and all kinds of intriguing explanations emerge.

Question 1: When you go to your ATM, the person in front of you at the machine takes so long that those waiting outside grow day-old beards. What is this person doing? How long does it take to withdraw a maximum of Rs 10,000? And what is a decent interval after which one can rap on the glass partition and check if the person is alive/awake?

Answer: Exit polls taken at these ATM booths provided some rather illuminating explanations: some people read out every transaction of the previous 10 months to their CA over their cell phone. Some get side-tracked while taking their ATM card out of their wallet, and undertake a long overdue spring cleaning of their wallet. They throw out to-do lists from 1995, photographs from a previous marriage, visiting cards of long-dead associates, etc. One retired teacher told us that she punched in all the wrong answers at every query from the machine ‘to see if it was paying attention’. So there – one mystery resolved. These people are not trying to rob the bank or figure how to withdraw money from your account or anything. They're just using the privacy to catch up on life.

As for what you can do to kind of hurry these people along, a word (or several) of caution: don't ever rap on the glass partition. It only causes the compulsive counters to begin to re-count from the beginning for the fifth time. If you’re really in a bad mood and have been watching too much of Cops or Incredible Police Videos, you could convince the security guard to riddle any person who takes more than 5 minutes with bullets, but you'll find that most of these guards are lazy fellows with no sense of urgency in such matters. So, whenever possible, use non-violent means. Passive aggression is the name of the game. Carry a whining child (your own or borrowed) along. Once it starts whining with: "Lets gooo, how long more, I want to do susu, Has that uncle inside died?" etc, it will be only be a matter of a few second before the dawdler inside ejects him/herself and flees - possibly without even collecting his/her money.

Question 2: Why does one regularly get junk emails whose body copy consists of pure, pure gobbledygook? Simply strings of words that have absolutely no relation to one another.

Only two example will suffice (I haven’t made this up. Seriously. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.):

1) “percy stevedore party petition fledgling cavalier adrift cometary bindle transylvania dew boeotia gagging cubic exculpate suffix ripe nasty caterpillar fermat dispelling appearance conflagration touch breakfast carmela wardrobe abort goldfish philanthropic attrition incessant laymen hellgrammite tribal ornery biracial”

2) “skimpy insouciant quicksilver evident gaff stephenson frilly concourse swathe absorption catatonia bedridden cabana pravda quid wad craggy discernible declamatory digitate lawful nymphomania afresh eben rawlinson pont mist rhodium theresa coddington kimberly obscene perceptive simulcast briny barricade grossman methodology rocky caliper thundershower ortega buzzer koch elevate fumble lay precocious catchy seraglio inhalation freeing sinful ely jackboot”

And who sits and writes these? What is he/she/it trying to tell me?

Answer: Maybe these are arbitrary strings of words meant to dodge your spam filter (don’t ask how and why). It is equally possible that this is not spam/junk at all, but desperate attempts by Aliens to contact us. Here we are, efficiently blocking and deleting these outpourings, when actually they need to be patiently decoded. Possibly these Aliens are trying to urgently alert us, that from where they sit, Pune looks engulfed in vehicular pollution, and on a quiet day they can even hear our traffic. And that it’s time we visited them and checked out their housing/schooling/governance/water management and built an Expressway to their galaxy. (Poor wretches, they don’t know what they’re asking for.)

Question 3: Who generated the news that NASA said that precisely between 9.45-10 pm on 30 September, we would see some wonderous happening on the moon – red sparks and fireworks due to some ‘mineral activity’, or words to that effect?

Answer: Since nothing of the kind happened, though we hung around in our balconies, our eyes propped open with matchsticks, so that we don’t even blink, there could be only several explanations. One, since this was not reported in any paper or on any news channel, and was only breaking news on SMS, the person generating it could well be a phone company. Noticing that people of the serious kind are not SMSing enough, the phone company possibly decided to float ‘news’ that was bound to catch the fancy of us earnest popular-astronomy types. They really mooned us on that one. There we were, excitedly forwarding the message (which also said that this phenomenon occurred once in 657 years, or some such precise figure) to our near and dear ones, spreading the bunkum all around. And someone must have gone sniggering all the way to the bank. Then again, it may be NASA’s way of making the rest of the world look the other way while it does Something Else.

Now it’s time to get back to the more real problems of the Universe, like who one should vote for in the forthcoming elections, and more importantly, whatever for?

It Takes All Kinds To Fill a Kitchen

After years of watching famous as well as ordinary cooks in their kitchens (and also mucking around at the stove oneself), you come to the conclusion that there are several distinct kitchen personality-types.

There’s the Perfectionist. Every piece of veggie is cut into just-so pieces of equal length and breadth. A dish simply cannot be made if even one ingredient is missing. This person does not know the meaning of substitution. Were you to tell her/him to use green chillies because the red ones are over, you will get a look which says: “Next you’ll tell me to breathe carbon dioxide because oxygen is over”. Needless to say, the final outcome is some spectacular cooking, but they’re generally a pain to be around, and it’s best to show up only to taste their wonderful productions, and not offer to help them during the process.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, the Hit and Miss cook. This type hurls whatever is at hand in the general direction of a kadai or wok, and on some days comes out trumps and on some days produces barely edible food. These types are more fun to be around while they’re cooking, and can produce a super-hit item with a quite unconscious panache. But you have to be ready to simply empty the contents of the kadai into the dog’s plate and order take-away on one of their misfire days. Because of their chronic casualness, however, they can never repeat a successful dish. If you ask them to, they’ll look distressed, as if you’re asking them to remember and repeat the 14-times table.

The chronic recycler is another type you meet often. They will never ever give away food (and throw away? impossible!). The family will simply have to eat everything till it’s over. Some of them can get quite innovative and come up with novel leftover-makeovers, but they can also get a bit carried away, and offer you khatarnak recycled stuff. One of them recently presented guests with what looked like golden-fried batata wadas. Once you bit into it though, you realized that 2-day old rice had been mixed with curds, adroitly rolled into little spheres, dipped in batter and fried. Very innovative, but not recommended. If a family member ever asks them if they can avoid the leftovers and have something fresh, this type is bound to lecture about starving children of the world, etc.

Then there are those poor dears who like to think of themselves as experimental cooks. They assiduously attempt Thai, Chinese, Kashmiri, Mexican, Continental…but it all finally tastes amazingly like varan-bhaat. Their fatal flaw is that they simply will not go out and buy any special ingredients. Only anything available in their regular masala rack goes into these experiments. Guests are left to say ‘hmmm interesting’ and other such safe remarks, if they are not to hurt these hopefuls. If you suggest, while pulling tulsi leaves politely out of your mouth, that Thai basil is now easily available, they look at you and sniff: “See how well I could make do without it.”

There are those who are cookbook devotees. They can never really learn a dish, or put their own spin to it, or cook by ‘andaaz’ however often they make it. Each time, they must open the cookbook and simply go by the book. Even veggie khichadi is made by dipping every now and then into their pressure cooker cookbook, or some such. And if you were to suggest they just try to go by instinct, they look at you like you’re asking them to go out and suddenly fly a plane.

Liar-liar cooks. These are the ones who will buy kababs from outside, set them in a micro dish, and pretend they made them from scratch. Or they’ll go through elaborate lengths to convince you that they’ve slaved over the stove to produce Diwali goodies with their own lily-white hands. Don’t even try calling their bluff. They will simply embarrass you by lying some more, coming up with louder and louder proof that there’s no Chitale in their chakli or Karachiwala in their kachori or Joshi in their jamuns.

The something-from-nothing types are an awe-inspiring lot. Where you and I may see a couple of worried looking chillies, half an onion and a near-empty fridge, they produce a kick-ass pithla, a couple of bhakris, and maybe even some kheer thrown in, all in 10 minutes, while you’re hunting for the meals-on-wheels phone number or some such cop-out option. If you tell them that all the food on the planet is over, they’ll solar-fry you a batch of ants and you’ll soon be asking for more.

The late bloomers are a lovely lot. They’re usually men. Having spent the better part of their lives being something horribly sensible like engineers and breadwinners, post-retirement they simply blossom in the kitchen, much to their family’s delight. They source rare recipes, they have the patience to slow-cook meat or roast corn to perfection, they revive old nearly-forgotten or lost recipes from the recesses of their formidable 80-year-old memories, they potter around in Mandai and buy the pick of every season. If you ask them where they were all these years, they look at you with a twinkle in the eye and serve you some cleverly made fruit wine, or a sweet potato baked to perfection with the aid of something as basic as a thick tava with a well-fitting lid. If you’re lucky enough to have one of these in your family, cherish them and rejoice!

Photos and Blogs

Some people like to see family photo albums, and some people have albums thrust upon them. As far as Im concerned, if I've seen one pic of your cute nephew, I've seen them all. Ive seen one pic of you getting married, Ive seen them all. Ive seen one pic of your ajji turning 80, Ive seen them all. But somehow I have always found myself, from a very young age, sitting on peoples drawing room sofas, with one massive album balanced open on my lap, and about seventeen more stacked next to me. And the people of the house are giving me helpful footnotes like: thats my nephew Pappu being potty-trained. Or theyre providing me minute and excruciating details about the sari, jewellery and make-up of a bride who is their uncles sons sister-in-laws cousins new wife. Small arguments may break out even: one person says, array no tanchoi she was wearing at the reception; paithani was for the main wedding. While this is being sorted out, you have to stay on that leaf of the album, while a small voice inside you is saying whocareswhocareswhocareswhocares or nextnextnext. Its the most meaningless when you have attended the occasion in question. You were there. Now why do you need photographic evidence that it happened? As I grew, I became better and better at adroitly turning three pages at a time when no one was looking, so that you could skip along at a pace that ensured that you could tunnel through the other seventeen albums fast and get home before dark.

Then came the video cameras. There was no skipping anything there. You had to sit through hours of shaky camera work and bad sound, while admiring someone marrying/graduating/bringing baby home, and a whole lot of other rites of passage. Again, Ive seen one shot of your kid in a black gown on the lawns of an American University, Ive seen them all I dont need 2 hours of footage to get the point, much as I love and admire your kid.

(The only amateur video I have hugely enjoyed is one taken circa 1968 by neighbours who went to Africa. When they returned they projected the stuff they had filmed on a blank wall at home, and we would eat roast beef laid over crusty, well-soured Mumbai bread cut in thick slices, and drink a fizzy raspberry drink whose name will come back to me tomorrow, after this piece has gone into the innards of the printing process. The highlight for us eight-year-olds then, was the part when a rhino pee-ed copiously and noisily for a good 40 seconds of film time. The rewind mechanism was unknown then, and we would happily sit through the entire film again just to get to the incontinent rhino part. But I digress.)

Then came the urls. You asked someone about their holiday or their daughter, and youd get an email or be told online: go to www.see3000picsofmyvacation or www.seemykidgrow. This was the least troublesome, because how much of it you saw was between you and your computer, and you could click randomly to get the basic picture, and exit.

Today, the new menace is blogs. For some people, they have replaced the here-are-endless-photographs-of-my-shaadi-from-every-angle. With photos and home videos, at least there is an occasion, trip, something around which somebody has gone mad with a camera. With blogs, you can now be locked into reading the outpourings of someone stuck in a city theyre unhappy with, in a job (or lack of one) that they hate, or with a child whose antics are cute but not something to be necessarily documented for posterity and the world at largein short just leading their lives, but for some reason turning them over into the public domain, and insisting that you stay abreast, every week. So now you have to get on to the Net, go to their blog, and read all about how little Neha threw the mobile in the pot and pulled the flush, and how many exact dollars and cents it costs in Singapore to have a plumber fish out the mobile. (Part of you is wanting to ask a technical question about whether the mobile survived the ordeal and is now yukkily back in active service.) Its one of those stories that no doubt is very funny if you were there, but loses something in the telling. On top of it, the blogger will ask you every week did you read my blog? did you read my blog? And then insist that you comment on the content, style, literary merits (or lack thereof). Yes, there is a novel inside every one of us, but sometimes I think its better that it stays inside.

Ok that was a really nasty crack, and I understand that this kind of thing has some therapeutic value one blogger friend tells me sometimes she can detach from some awful stuff going on in her life because shes thinking how it can be used in next weeks blog. Another says that it is a great way to keep a diary, and let your friends know the ups and downs of your lifebut I dont know. Now I yearn for the days when you could pick three pages of a polythelene photo album together and turn them swiftly when no one was looking.