Dear Everybody,
I am here to answer the question that I have been asked by every single person I encounter post marriage. “So, how is married life?”. This is my usual response: I shrug my shoulders and say “Oh well, its same as before.” What the other person wants to hear, I don’t know. But I am very conscious of the fact that I am somehow disappointing my questioner by that answer. I guess this is one of the cases where telling a white lie is better than the truth. So here is my answer to how is my married life.
There have been changes in my daily life and routine. I would in the normal course of things attribute it to the fact that I changed my residence from urban Philly to suburban Gaithersburg, I changed my job from academia to corporate sector, and from a single living to shared accommodation. Or perhaps these changes are what they construe as post-marriage life. Who knows?
I spent the first month since our return from India in the time tested manner of mourning the fact that I am in US and that the next trip home was eons away. I calculated and recalculated the days I would need to work to earn enough leave to go home again and thought of a ton of excuses to take another break in an year. In the end I regretfully abandoned the thought of going home for at least 18 months and settled down to work.
In a way, the fact that I had taken 6 weeks of vacation helped. I realized that I had been ex-communicado from office for six great weeks while my colleagues were being bombarded with SOS calls during their vacations. Amidst that euphoria there were also some residual feelings of guilt. On the basis of that alone, I worked a little harder and a little longer than usual. Also, to aid my good intentions of working I had to travel a couple of times on company related visits to Miami, Florida .
On the homefront, I was busy arranging stuff in my new apartment, quarrelling with Seejo on the precise arrangement of furniture such that they maximized our space, the resting place for the iron board and whether salt should be kept on the shelf to the right of the cooking range or the left. Such are the exciting moments of my married life. I have also been seeing a lot more movies with Seejo, some of which we bought in Kerala, and catching up on the Hollywood movies, we missed on our vacation. Thus I saw Shrek2, Terminal, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Harry Potter and POA. For relaxation we are also sorting out the large collection of photos we took during our Europe trip. We are about half way done and once that monumental task is over …I shall be putting up an album on the net.
And now to the most popular follow-up question to the first one. This is especially a great favorite of all elders in Malluland. Almost before I have finished anwering the earlier question, the plow onto “So have you started cooking?â€. To which the answer is a resounding yes. This time instead of seeing satisfaction in their expression (as I expected) all I see is polite disbelief. Some even go to the point of clarifying,…Yes good, What I “really†mean is do YOU cook ? So yes dear people, I cook. And we eat. And we live …..happily ever after, I suppose!!
