The "Months leading to Monu's wedding" series Part 1: Introducing Chacha

Dear readers- if there are any-

My silence here, and especially about the six protagonists of this blog is due to the fact that my freedom of expression is being hindered by at least one of my siblings who has some borderline-obsessive ideas about privacy that sometimes make me wonder if the sibling is not mistaking self for a celebrity and me for a paparazzo. But then the sibling is own blood after all, so I still feel some love, albeit grudgingly.

But for every sibling who does drama like is described above, there is another who won't mind being written about in any which way because she does not access Internet. I wish they were all like that. Monu. My sweet, simple, home-to-office;office-to-mall;mall-to-home Monu got hitched a few months back to her medium-term sweetheart Rahul. They are getting married on December 01.

We had a Roka ceremony for Monu and Rahul that was spearheaded by Chacha (Monu's father and my younger paternal uncle) against almost everybody's inclination. Let me introduce you the very strong-headed, well-intending and badly-executing man that my Chacha is. The men in my family are all generously flawed and each likes to think that this fact is true for all men except the man in thought. He is too.

So while all of us said give it more time, let Monu and Rahul be for a while, there is no rush to get them married yet and other similar sentiments, he took extreme pains to be pointedly rude to everybody and went ahead with the Roka ceremony anyway.

Now given this offensive behaviour, you can imagine how utterly and sadistically elated I am to find Chacha struggling in the new roles of father-of-the-bride-to-be, father-in-law-to-be and समधी-to-be. In fact, so happy am I that in between typing this post, I am rubbing my hands together in the age-old expression of shrewd happiness felt at the downfall of the mighty. The reason that Chacha is struggling stems from two of his traits:

Trair#1: When it comes to any kind of work, Chacha has the attention span that fleas would be proud of. Like the other men in my family, Chacha too takes his personal comforts and leisure time very seriously and so he can only work two hours at most everyday, of which one hour is used in what we call "गोली देना".

Trait#2: Chacha is self-obsessed and quite anti-social (don't gasp in offence and say "the nerve to talk in this manner about an elder of the family!"; this is a direct quote). He likes to switch off his phone if it rings three or four times in succession and he is known to have to hear painfully-long lectures from his daughters for not calling and keeping tabs on them. "Why should we not go out drinking and roaming on the streets with boys at night", they scream, "since we know our father is bloody well never going to call us to find out where we are!". The madness never ends, really.

Now the impact of these traits on post-Monu's-roka-life in the family are as follows: Chacha hired a contractor to do some repair work in our house that he said would be finished in two weeks. The contractor worked diligently for two days and in these two days began to notice how nobody bothered to check if the labourers were working or not, or how many labourers had been put to work, or why was there need to bring X bags of cement. So day three onwards, he began to live life chacha-style and three weeks later when we realized that we had all become used to the slow hammering over our heads and that it was already a week past the deadline, we asked the contractor how much work was still remaining, to be told that the work would take another two months.

Let me tell you- opposites do attract and I can say this with absolute certainty when I look at Chacha and Chachi (i.e. Monu's mother). She is the one person in this entire household who is of the no-nonsense kind (the rest of us ranging from the "some-nonsense kind" to "complete-nonsense kind"). She had planned for the house to be repaired in three weeks most so that the whitewash could begin before the monsoons ended and thereon, shopping for Monu's wedding could begin September-onwards in Delhi. Now with the Contractor declaring that he needed two months more, there were problems my friends. And since these problems were mostly for Chacha, I was back to rubbing my hands gleefully again.

Re-read Trait#2 if you will. When one makes such an artless effort to get his daughter and her beau engaged as Chacha did, one has to assume some responsibility for the choice. Me thinks me Chacha did not realize this then and so it is now another very sadistically-satisfying experience for me to observe him trying to keep up with his duties as the father of the bride-to-be- you know, calling all family members about every small development, extending and also accepting invitations to the groom's family (who by the way are wonderful people), and of course making sure the contractor finishes work on time. This is so anti-Chacha's inherent nature that it makes me believe in Karma.

So there you are. Having shared these petty details of a personal grudge against my kin, and having therefore unburdened myself, I shall pay more attention to the less-ridiculous details of the wedding and henceforth write about the actual planning/scheduling of the same.