Who
is Gamora?
Meeting a girl for a date is often akin to
going for a job interview. And just like any interview, one of the most crucial
questions to ask is, why did you leave
your previous job?
There can be various reasons behind someone
leaving their previous job. It could be due to cost-cutting measures,
incompetence, or even a snide remark about the collarbone of the cute girl in
the diagonally opposite cubicle (I’m 70% sure that it’s not based on a true
story). Each answer reveals something about the person's character, values, and
compatibility.
Then there are other important questions.
Like how could she help the company grow? What was her previous compensation?
Where do we see ourselves in five years?
In the Indian marriage set-up, directness
is often considered rude, especially when it comes to taking important life-altering
permanent decisions. We prefer to hide behind a veil of polite vagueness.
Hence, the interview process is conducted by the wise bald uncle of the family.
This uncle is always a relative, usually the brother of the mother. And the
father’s family is given the ornamental role of sitting quietly at the sidelines,
like the potted plants in a waiting room — pretty but irrelevant.
When you reach a marriageable age in the
Indian society, all these relatives and uncles gather up to motivate you to get
you married and assess your expectations. It's a gathering that can be likened
to a bizarre circus, with clowns juggling questions and acrobats performing
gravity-defying feats of intrusiveness. And amidst the chaos, the most absurd
inquiries are thrown your way. The questions asked during these gatherings can
be quite intrusive, and my answers always manage to push the boundaries.
What
kind of a girl do you want? they ask, expecting a
precise list of attributes as if I were shopping for the perfect life partner
on Amazon.
Someone as open ended as this question, I reply.
Do
you want a love marriage or arranged marriage?
For a love marriage, I lack a girl. For an arranged
marriage, a reason.
How
much do you earn?
How much will she spend?
How
big is your house?
What else are you going to measure?
What
are your expectations from this marriage?
Three Crores, giving them
a deadpan stare.
What
will you give the girl?
12% annuity on the dowry.
But when my dad informed me that his friend
had a potential match in mind and that the girl's uncle wanted to meet me, I
was not surprised. And it came as no surprise to Dad when I objected meeting
him. The whole setup sounded less than ideal, with a vague reference to my
dad's friend's friend's relative's daughter. So after some haggling and a 30
minute conversation with my dad’s friend where he even cajoled me into
accepting his long pending Facebook request, I agreed to meet this uncle.
If there was a lesson in this story, we
have reached it at this point. The lesson: Nothing
good can come out of a 30-minute phone conversation between two men.
The remainder of this story is for kicks.
I dressed up for battle that day, donning
my crispiest white shirt, doused myself in an extra splash of branded perfume,
and strutted out with a confidence usually reserved for international
supermodels. The scent was so overpowering that someone standing close to my
armpit on the train might have fainted. Even Ashfaq at the office remarked that
I looked good, and she never says anything nice about… anyone. Ever.
Now this girl… I can’t really describe her.
Mostly because I don’t know anything about her. With the long chain of
connections trying to orchestrate our future child-rearing, neither my dad nor
his friend had any information about the girl. In fact, I couldn't even recall
her name. Let's just call her Gamora for now.
I met Gamora’s uncle for lunch that day.
Problem was, no one told him that I expected lunch out of this meeting. He invited me to a modest café near my
office. The kind which would be embarrassed if you asked for snacks with tea.
The most edible thing there was the biscuit. To be fair, they were better off
without the biscuit. This uncle, as it turned out, was the
second-cousin-elder-brother of Gamora’s father. And he knew as much about the
girl as a hen knows about an omelet. We met for a common goal under common
circumstances, but it felt like we were speaking different languages. While I
was interested in knowing about the girl herself, he seemed more interested in
discussing the girl's family. He mentioned that she was around 5'4", but
added a hesitant "maybe" because the last time he had seen her, she
was barely two feet tall.
During the meeting, the uncle struggled to
connect with me. He asked about my job and what I do, but it took me all of 30
seconds to realize that he had no interest in the intricacies of insolvency.
After exchanging pleasantries and enduring the worst cup of coffee ever, I
returned to the office, feeling the inquisitive gaze of Ashfaq on me.
I recounted this episode to Dad, who just
said, ‘oh!’ Later I got a call from dad’s friend who apologized for the mishap.
Now I’m not someone who rubs it in someone’s face when they are wrong. So
naturally when I got the call, I displayed my disappointment by not saying
much, and making sure the uncle understood exactly how offended I was. This
validated my initial objections against this meeting. Validation is good. Always.
Specially when you get to rub it in your dad’s friend’s face.
I later blocked this uncle from my
Facebook. He later told my Dad that me and Gamora would have been a good match
for each other. Even she had blocked the uncle from Facebook. Maybe he was
right. But I could not let this man be right. So I added him again, only to
discover that he had a beautiful, educated, and unmarried daughter who was
working in a large multinational in London. This… moron of a man, who was
trying to set me up with a strange girl about whom neither he nor his friend
who met me knew, had a perfectly fine and beautiful daughter available. Right
there. I fumed. I settled. And then I made my move.
"Hey!" I wrote on LinkedIn.
