I love the story of the first time my parents met. See, my mum's elder sister's marriage had taken a really, really long time to fix, so everyone figured mum's would take just as long. Then she met my dad.
In her words, he was like the schoolmaster businessman they showed in Hindi movies, with his vague Bengali accent and his John Lennon glasses. Not what a conventional Tamil Iyer looks like, though he did have degrees from REC and IIM. Mum, on the other hand, looked like a total Tam at first glance. Degree in housekeeping, hair even longer than my dad's (dad's hair was nearly all the way down his back!), perfectly tied sari.
What was supposed to follow was the typical ponnu-paakara scene, right? With the 'do you sing' coming from my dad, and the demure recital by mum. Instead, to everyone's surprise, he gave her a complex math problem. I've never been able to solve it, but the answer's zero, and I think my dad was as surprised as anyone when mum worked it out without blinking (really, I don't know where these genes went!). She had her veena out, and so she sang, obviously. Then, to her surprise, he took the veena over and played do-re-mi, explaining how it was rather like his guitar really (these genes I have, believe me).
I don't know if they realized then how perfect they were for each other. All she wanted was a groom who liked Hindi movies, and all he wanted as dowry was her veena... he explained later that he wanted to try playing 'Imagine' on it! The match was made. They've never looked back.
They're really different people, you know. My mum's sense of humour's much like mine (evil!), and she gossips about as much as I do. My dad on the other hand was born to be a leader, and he conducts himself as such. Any jokes he makes are gentle, and he tends to lord over any meeting. My mum's been an extrovert all her life but can pull off a mean impression of being demure, while my dad's secretly shy but you'd never know it to hear him address thousands of people.
Still, it's like a scene out of Sabrina the teenage witch - their souls just fit together perfectly. They've been together for more than thirty years now and you can see it's because they love it. They take turns getting mad at my brother and me, they've established who does what, and even today my dad can't stay in Bangalore longer than a week without rushing back to Chennai to spend the weekend with her. They go out for movies more often than a teenage couple in love, and god forbid a day should go by without a phone call or an email.
Who says there's no romance in arranged marriages? I'll never forget one particular birthday of hers, when we were in the TS, and my dad was travelling on business. Near midnight, we hear a knock, and there's my dad bearing a bouquet of flowers while mum blushed embarrassed and totally surprised. This is a good fourteen-fifteen years into marriage, mind you. My uncle and my grandfather smiled while my brother and I wondered if we were still asleep, and I know we all privately thought they were both frikkin' crazy.
I don't know if marriages like that happen too often. I'm just glad I got to see one.
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