RADS ENGAGEMENT- 1

This blog fizzled out soon after I started writing it. More pressing issues diverted the parents’ attention from the task of getting their children married. But then things happened and so quickly that I am still sometimes caught off guard wondering if it is for real!

Rads got engaged. Engaged to be married. Whoa! Serious stuff! From the hazy past, here is my recollection of events-
Rads mentioned about this guy who works with her and next thing we know, Big P, Big mom and bua are headed to Gurgaon to meet Vicky’s family. They come back very happy, exact plan of action thereon not specified. Later, Vicky’s father comes to Dehradun to meet his younger son, who is an IMA cadet, and also to meet Rad’s parents on their home turf. That went very well, and both sides were still happy, exact plan of action thereon not specified. Still later, we learn that Rads and Vicky would come from Hyderabad in October for a few days, so something ought to be done to seal the deal, as it were- exact plan of action thereon STILL not specified. So for a couple of months all we knew was that Rads and Vicky were going to be engaged someday to be married even later. So we were all waiting for something concrete to happen.

Then it happened- all of it. Tumbling together down in a flood of events which are now a heap of distorted memories. I try to sort them out but it is all a jumbled, happy mess of a time. Rads reached Doon and Vicky reached Gurgaon- each with the other’s ring. After much debate and deliberation, October 12 was fixed as THE day. It had to be a roka ceremony only, at Big P’s place with about 15 guests from each side. It was an engagement ceremony at a wedding point near Big P’s house with about twice the number of guests originally decided upon.

Big P is Monica from Friends- an obsessive and fretful guy who has to do everything himself. It is a standard joke in the family, derived from a solid fact that Big P wakes up at 5 in the morning but has never reached work on time, since he must walk back and forth from one end of the house to the other about a hundred times picking up the paper, putting the clothes out to dry, collecting old newspapers, sunning the mattresses etc. So we were all quite clueless about what we were supposed to do. During family meetings, the conversation went as follows:

Somebody would keep reading off things that were to be done. For instance, “Milk badam for the guests as soon as they reach” or “Getting a fruit basket made for sagan” and so on and so forth. At the end of each sentence, Big P’s voice would come from an obscure corner of the room to say, “Uski chinta aap matt karna, wo main sambhal lunga.”

So by the end of it, we had to only prepare ourselves for the big day when we would be rushing around to complete the errands that poor Big P was, understandably unable to.

Sonu reached Doon on 3rd, Monu reached on 9th, Chachi’s birthday came and went on the 10th and all too soon, it was October 12.