Ahem…..aaaa….. Hmmmp…..Uuuummmmm…….I don’t know…….Lifting eye brows….Shaking head….looking listlessly at the ceiling……
Never had so much starting trouble since my communication theory paper. Seriously.

I have always considered the my wedding very unromantic and typical. The thought only aggravated after reading all the engagement mush that circulated on the blogs. The Green Sulk Club was formed. For more details about GSC, our history, motto, how to apply for membership and point of contact, please read Tharini’s introduction.

There I was busily sulking away and Dotmom tags me on the engagement story. Quite frankly there isn’t much to write about. The horoscopes matched, my elder SIL dropped by one evening to see me, after the seal of approval was issued, boy meets girl, gets engaged and they get married after eight months. I tried my best to get out of the tag, but DotMom was relentless. She wanted me to write about the most mushiest momemt of our married life. I discussed with the co-members of Green Sulk Club and we decided to take up this tag. Tharini requested I write a little bit about the engagement. So here is the typical south indian engagement story and the mushes after that.

On the D-day (May 21, 1998) R came with my MIL, his two sisters and their husbands. A very cozy affair with 6 people from R’s family and only the immediate family from my side. I was wearing a salwar, which was ‘noted’ and ‘mentioned accidentally’ on a much later date 🙂 . Some one in the audience suggested that the bride-to-be and the groom-to-be talk privately for a few minutes. I had anticipated this and had cleaned up my room on the earlier part of the day. But the privacy the majority had in mind and managed to give us was, R and self sitting in the living room and the rest of them sitting in the dinning area keeping and eye (and an ear) on us.

R asked me what I think about the wedding and I replied something insane like, ‘If it is okay by my father, I am okay with it.’ (Blaaahhhh, I have never been the person who come up with intelligent answers on the spot. 24 hrs later I would have the best quip, best answer to any question. But the moment would have long gone!). The engagement was to be conducted on May 29, 1998. A few minutes after R and his family stepped out of the house, our telephone line went dead. So our chance of us catching up over the phone went down the drain. During the numerous visits my father made to their house in planning the engagement details, a request was placed to my father, asking his permission to take me with them (R, his two sisters, mother, four nieces and nephews) to the tamil movie Jeans. My father promptly refused saying that it is not appropriate since we weren’t even engaged. God, I don’t know why he did that?!

In the 8 months of post engagement time, there was the biweekly phone calls. But hubby’s voice kind of wanes after sometime and I for the fear of being pronounced as ‘hearing impaired’ if I ask him to speak up every five minutes, settled in to a pattern of ‘Oh – okay – ahha – ooooh’ at periodic intervals. Long story short, I am still discovering all the things I said ‘yes’ to. Hmm, the letter…I must mention the letter. I used to send him pictures through snail mail and one of his snail mail replies was 10 pages, double sided, hand written with about 15 lines per page. That letter is one of its kind, still puts a smile on my face. Now a days it is mostly one line emails – ‘Refinance done’, ‘Are we attending this b’day party?’, ‘pick up diapers from Costco’.

What made it trickier was that hubby reads my blogs and is not too keen about me writing personal details on my blog. After reading my tag posts about My quirks, My dreams, Middle Name Tag etc he commented that off late my posts have become ‘too weird’. I became defensive and of course we had a fight. If he objects personal details about the kids or myself, I could brush it off, but if it is something that involves him, I have to be civil enough to accept his feelings about it. Right?! So I enlisted his help.

Me: R, there is this tag about the most mushiest moment in our 8 years of married life. What do you think it is?
He: Ummm. What do YOU think it is?
Me: I can’t think of any.
He: Ooohooo. You mean we don’t have any? Okay I want it mentioned in bold, big fonts in your blog that, ‘We have two kids and still feel there is not even a single mushy moment in 8 years’.
(Here it is R, it is mentioned. I am a lady of my words.)
Me: Don’t digress. What do you think is the most mushiest moment? I asked you first.
He: What about the time I swept you off your feet when I took you to that French restaurant? Wasn’t that romantic? We ordered soufflé and we had fun. Right?
Me: (Desparately trying to recall the French restaurant) Ummmmm….Okay next.
He: Next–a? What about the top of the Eiffel tower?
Me: Naaaahhh.
He: What about the first time we met?
Me: Che che. (After a minute, my face brightening up). Oh, so WHAT did you think the first time you saw me?
He: No. That moment is gone. Nothing. What about it? You are imagining things that I didn’t say.

Truth is we both had some memories under the ‘romantic’ tab, but they were so different that will make a neutral third party observer to suspect that we are not married to each other.

From my memory, I have few significant instances. The one most, utterly, incredibly nice thing he did for me was hike with me up the Kilimanjaro. I like to travel. If I make plans to visit a place, I like to do a extensive trip under the following two assumptions: (1)The world is going to be destroyed and I simply HAVE to see every inch of this place. (2)Okay the world is not going to be destroyed, but this would be my first and last trip to this place and I simply HAVE to see very inch of it. According to hubby I have the special power to turn a vacation in to a hectic ordeal, after which he needs to take a vacation (without me, of course) to recover from the first vacation. I some how managed to convince him to go for an African safari. For reasons unfathomable I felt we had to do the Kili hike. I put my fundas, convinced hubby and roped him in. Now, hubby likes certain things, relaxed sleep in a warm and cozy bed, his morning coffee, reading his news paper sipping his coffee, simple and healthy but good food, a long jog/run, doing things around the garden, if possible a nice afternoon nap, watch some silly stuff on TV. He is a creature of habit, we are talking about a person who had the same cereal for 4 years, every single day in the morning! He threw all that out of the window. He trained for months, took vaccines, medication for altitude sickness, drank water from streams in which we added chlorine tablets to kill germs, ate what was put on the plate, woke up at insane hours in the morning to start the hike, walked with me enduring my instructions and at times alone, slept in the A-huts along the Marangu route with three layers of clothing to escape the biting cold and frost…..beeeecaaaause, I wanted to do it. All this, for ME.

Right after surgery, I was lying in post-op busily sulking away, filling up my mind with as much negative emotions as possible. The one thought that stabilized me was ‘what hubby would do all alone?’. Then I started thinking that we need to be there for each other which led to the thought that ‘this too shall pass’ -> we may never have children, but we for sure have a purpose in life -> how can I leave without knowing my purpose? Convalescing at home, I would wait all day for him to come back from work and crash on the couch with him. Kind of felt right.

If I am the ship that wants/tends to wander away, he is always the lighthouse. The ship has never thanked the lighthouse(never will in direct words, read between the lines R and thats it 🙂 ), in fact most of the time thinks that the light house ropes her in from all the wonderful adventures the mystic sea has to offer. Our characters and personalities are as different as the ship and the lighthouse – one in water, ever dancing, going up and down with every wave, always wanting to move and fluid – the other firmly rooted on land, unrelenting, not bothered by the lashing waves, but always there. But they belong to each other.