Surprise, Surprise!

Tie the knot by TCR4x4, on Flickr

Prologue

Next month, by this time, I will be a family man from a bachelor bloke. Lightning strikes when you are most unprepared for it, like when you are holding an iron rod. Lightning struck me when I was holding a plane load of iron pillars. The lightning went straight through my flux capacitor and here I am three years into the future. It doesn't feel so bad, but I am concerned about the aftermath of such an unprecedented event. Responsibility was never my accomplice. Well, I chose him not to be. He is like a laxative, shit happens when he's around.

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To sound fair and to avoid future confrontations and severe implications, I should mention that the to be Mrs.Nair is a good soul. The stinky tramp of a soul, which is mine of course, would be wiping the hawai chappals of her servant's soul. Now that enough balance has been achieved for me to have a grip on my side of the argument, if any should arise in the course of time, let me continue.

The aforesaid event was a calculated and manipulative move by the head of the family named Father. No, I am not complaining here. This is supposed to be a compliment for Father. I went on a much awaited vacation during a fateful September. The year was 2010 and I was just about to cross over the line into the 26th year of my existence. An innocent and unsuspecting me walked right into the centre of some well laid plans. I came home on a Saturday, had the best food I'd had in a year for two days. On Monday, I found myself sitting in the front passenger seat of a car going at 70 kmph to Thiruvalla. I tried to be calm and composed. My tension management guru, Shri. Shri. Sreesanth, had taught me a technique where by pumping your open palms up and down a couple of times, one can calm down easily. Watching all this with amusement were Sister and Mother from the comfort of the back seat.

By the time we reached Ms.Nair's house, there was a fleet of cars following us. The Relatives had joined us at various points through out the journey. If we had adorned a couple of flags to represent any of the various big, small, too small or imaginary political parties' of India, it would have been the perfect picture of a mini political rally. But you know me na, I wasn't intimidated.

A dude walked out of the house to greet us. The dude scanned me with X Ray glasses. At least, it seemed like he was doing so. The dude was Ms.Nair's dad. He ushered us into the house to find many other dudes -  mushy dude, pretty serious dude, big dude, tall dude, old dude and small dude (some dudes omitted due to lack of adjectives).  I love it when I am the center of attraction, but not of dudes - that gets me nervous. I have never answered so many questions from so many people at the same time. I answered them and get this, I still kept on my innocent boy face.  The dude's still scanning. I know this game too well, I won't break. I had heard that this technique was used extensively in the Vietnam war for interrogating POWs. 

After my successful round with the dudes they huddled together and came to the decision to call upon the subject of our discussion, Ms. Nair. When my optic nerves registered the sight of the Lady, my brain started  processing speech in a mysterious way unknown to me. But my well trained sound output device, brought it down to a much suitable human understandable form of hello. I have a friendly word of advice to the eligible bachelors reading this. When the lady brings you tea, keep down, stay put. For one thing the tea will be hot. The second you wouldn't want to reveal your nervously shaking hand. The tea went down faster than a tequila shot down my throat burning my innards. And then we got to talk away from the prying eyes of the dude.

I had this video of Srinivasan meeting a girl ( from the movie Sandesham) running through my head in a continuous loop. For Non malayali's this would make no sense but for the record that movie rocked.  But lucky enough for me none of those dialogues made past my speech output device. To summarize what we talked about - movies, friends, hobbies and family. And what a relief it was to find that her favourite actor was Mohanlal. This meant that we would be able to get along very well, with the major cause of all arguments nullified. The Timekeeper announced that visitation was over. He claimed that we had taken well over 45 minutes, a claim which I will never admit as I am sure it was at least 15 minutes short of the time he claimed it to be. Then came the tough decision making time. I took a long five seconds to come to my decision. The same decision a mouse would take if you present it with the best smelling swiss cheese in the world and said to it that the cheese is its if it wants it. And that too to a cheese whose favourite actor is Mohanlal, there was no way I could have said no. The cheese also liked the mouse.  And that is how the poor Ms. Nair got stuck with me for the rest of her life.

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Epilogue

Now let's suppose I found out that marriage isn't as dangerous as people portray it to be and I find myself alive and kicking after a month. The whole pressure of getting married and settling down is over by now, right. No , Not right. This is when the real thing starts. I happen to know this is the phase when every Relative and passerby asks the QUESTION. ' Vishesham onnumille? (roughly translated as When's the baby coming? )'. This question, like the ones that got me to marry, has been handed down through many generations. It's very tough to avoid. The best way to avoid the answer is to be as vague as possible, just like when your client asks when the next release of the code is - 'Very Soon'. ( Even though ' please wait for eleven minutes, we'll try now and let you know.'  seems a more appropriate response, the questioner might decide to stay back and wait for the answer.) . Very soon - is a neat answer that will shut everyone up for at least a couple of months. That gives you two months time to think of your next response. You also get to escape from the below mentioned conversations :

'you need someone to look after you in your old age, you need to have kids when you are young otherwise it will be difficult in future excetera'. 

 As you can see, I have put a lot of thought into this. I will be putting it in practice shortly and will share the results with you.