Once bitten, never shy.

So, i broke the news to my aunts as well when they pestered me over the M word yet again, saying that their jhumkas would give me limitless blessings and their shararas would dance unashamed in the evening breeze if i could just find a guy and get married by, get this, next October. My mother couldn't stop smiling, my aunts were bursting with curiosity and grilling me about the boy (and i know zilch; well, close to zilch) and giving me these i-knew-something-was-up-your-sleeve looks.

I am stupefied. It's a stranger we're talking about here. Someone i hadn't heard of before last week. Someone i only showed SOME curiosity in. JUST curiosity. And NOT that i AM going to get married to him or something. Not that i AM going to get married AT ALL. If they're spilling all over themselves with happiness at just the interest i show in somebody who seems like a potential candidate for slaughter, i shudder to think what could happen if things actually work out.

Save me, God.

I feel Dante's pain.

I wish i could call it a poem, but it's not even prose. It started a day after Friday, not even a Good one at that. I met S, her husband and children. After a hearty lunch of Biryani, i hung around for a bit and then, just when i was leaving, her mom goes, "Hey there's a proposal. Are you interested?"

It wasn't just my feet that froze mid-motion. While my tongue tried to unstick itself from the roof of my mouth, S picked up from where her mom left off: "Baba knows him really well. He's apparently not looking for a regular bride."

Yeah, okay, so i'm not like the other Muslim girls who get married when they're still in college (read Pre-university) and are grandmothers by 45, who wear burqas and pray five times a day, listen to the advice of elders, don't hang around with friends who're smoking chimneys and leaking wineries, or even wear salwar kameezes or jeans with salwar kameez tops and dupattas. But that doesn't mean i automatically fall under the category of the extreme, rebel non-conformists. Which is why i was quite taken aback by her statement. And, i must confess, a little interested: it's not everyday that a boy of my clan wants a 'non-regular' sort of bride.

Whirling on S, i asked her what she meant by 'not a regular bride', and while she explained, i saw myself sort of veering towards the other side, the taboo side. Justifying to myself that it was just the non-regular bit that caught my attention (fortunately for me it is the ONLY thing that got me interested, and now i think i'm a little bored with it all), i told my Dad about it the next morning.

The momentary smile of pure joy that broke through his face made me shrink within. I couldn't help but feel guilty (not a new feeling at all) about having deprived my parents of that little happiness. Immediately after, i couldn't help but feel overwhelmed, pretty much burdened by my past. (Sounds so ominous, 'my past'.) And then i felt guilty about having thought of forsaking it. Well okay, not so much forsaking it as i was marvelling at my healing abilities. Time does work wonders.

So anyway, now the thing is that i'm completely dying of curiosity about the guy - and it's only curiosity, trust me - and want to meet him for a cup of coffee or something to ask him what his idea of a 'non-regular' bride is. So far, i've checked out Google and found zilch. If perchance, Mister I-Don't-Want-A-Regular-Bride, you've been looking me up the same way i am you, then be kind enough to leave a comment specifying what you meant by it. I'm very, very interested in knowing what your answer will be.

P.S: I used non-regular everywhere on purpose. The proper opposite of regular makes me uncomfortable in this instance, with its plethora of implications.
P.P.S: One need only scratch the surface to see the pain.

I'm cool like that.

So, like i've been harping about it since the accident, i haven't touched Red's steering wheel at all for a really long time. Until today, when my father's advancing age played tricks on him so that he thought he'd asked the driver to come home at 9. For once in my life, i diligently got ready by 8:30 - a miraculous, full half-hour before time. Call it instinct or whatever, but i asked my dad if he had told the driver to come in. Happily nodding yes, he went back to memorising the morning paper.

Come 9 o clock, and i'm shooting dad killer looks. He calls driver and finds out that, Oh, he hadn't told him to come at 9 after all! So there. As if to compensate for his lapse in memory, he removed the cover of the car. I went in and got the car keys from the keyholder, and started contemplating about whether i should save time and reverse the car.

After 15 minutes of speculation, i decided to take the plunge. Now, let me tell you that reversing is quite a process - an inch forward and i hit the neighbour's compound wall, an inch backward and i hit the lamp post or my home compound. It takes great precision, alertness and skill to reverse. And i did it, like, easy peasy.

So i was very proud of myself. Then driver came and saw the car reversed and was maha impressed as well. All in all, a good start to umm... more driving in the near future. (Future being the operative word.)

Back from the dead.

So, i had a near-death experience last week, thanks to my illness. Correction, illnesses. The flesh around my joints got all swollen and fit to burst. I couldn't walk because my feet hurt so much. The area over my veins turned bruised and blue (no pun intended, really). My face lost all its colour, my skin grew waxy and my body seemed possessed by unseen forces. All this because i enjoy my occasional Tropical Iceberg from CCD.

That's right, it is. My tonsils got so sick of me gulping down ice by the plastic glass like an arctic walrus, that they decided to have their revenge on me by bloating up to fill my throat and cause unbearable joint pain, accompanied by a fever that would put any tandoor to shame. Flu followed soon after, and with it a mighty allergy to the medicines doc prescribed for me - 650 mg of Novaclox and Imol. (The second med sounds like a Malayali invention, no?)

My first day of illness, i didn't venture out of bed. I couldn't. It was humanly impossible. Lifting anything that weighed more than 100 grams was a Herculean task. Day Two, i was better with the heavy dosages of pills. Day three was Eid. I had little energy to dress up in the sarees i had bought (what a waste it was to go shopping two weeks back), much less stand on my feet and bathe. Despite many threats of being disowned by the family if i took a bath and developed pneumonia, i went ahead and scrubbed away as much of the illness as i could without toppling over like a house of cards. Dressed in a saree that was all over the place, i went sniffling and eskimo-like to Grandma's. There, i watched faces gobbling down Biryani by the buckets while i chewed on phulkas and my mum's special 'Chicken Curry For Patients'. (Doc had warned me against eating rice, much less sniffing it even.)

On Day Four i ventured out of home to apply for my duplicate marks card. Half delirious, i walked two floors to school, hung around till somebody helpfully sat me down and translated some of the more complicated form instructions in Kannada, and the present principal sealed my fate with her signature and the school seal. Day Five, i was glued to the TV all day, shuffling from Samantha Brown on T & L to Behind Enemy Lines and Miss Potter thereafter. Day Six and Seven were unremarkable enough and passed in the dread of coming to office on Monday.

Which is where i am, incidentally. I intended to post a lot of interesting stuff - life-shattering philosophies and home truths that dawned on me in my feverish state, that i have most inconveniently forgotten now. So now you'll have to wait till i get sick again, or my brain decides to act up.