Teej Compliance

Teej, as some of you would know, is a festival celebrated in various parts of India. The customs and rituals vary from state to state, but essentially, it is observed by married women for the wellness of their husband, and also by unmarried girls in the hope of finding a worthy husband in the future.

I, however, have always remembered festivals like Teej and Karvachauth as days on which married women in my family would observe a “nirajal vrat” - a fast without having even a drop of water or a grain of food for the entire day. As a child, I was always amazed to see them achieve this feat year after year, rather cheerfully. Unmarried girls in my family were not expected to fast in order to secure a good husband for the future, and I was immensely grateful for that. But I used to dread the day when I would grow up and get married and be expected to fast for my husband. I was fairly sure I won’t survive my first Teej. Which is why my first Teej last year became quite a memorable experience for me.

As it turned out, despite not observing the fast when I was unmarried, I am blessed with not just a “good” husband, but one who tends to weigh all social conformance on the balance of logic. And someone’s well being depending on someone else fasting is something that absolutely makes no sense to him (like Paresh Rawal said to his daughter in Oh My God! - this concept is like your mother putting her phone up for charge, and MY phone’s battery getting charged instead.) And not just my husband, my in-laws also are fairly unconventional, and no one expected me to fast on my first Teej. (Yay!) All my mother-in-law wanted me to do on that day was - a) wear new clothes; b) pray to Lord Shiva; c) Avoid eating meat (and prevent her son also from eating it.)

Needless to say, I was delighted with these minimal expectations, but my husband - Siddharth, was quite upset having being told that he should not eat meat on that day (not because he needs meat every day, but because this condition again weighed heavily on the illogical side of things.) He did comply eventually, but was visibly annoyed. Anyway.

So in the evening on the day of my first Teej, I promptly wore a new sari, and got ready to pray to Lord Shiva. Which is when I realized that we did not have a single idol or photo of any of the 33 crore Indian gods anywhere in the house. (I think of myself as being more God-loving than God-fearing, and am not much into idol/photo worshipping, though I do believe in God, and Siddharth, predictably, is a non-believer, given the disbalance the belief in such an entity would cause in his weighing scale of logic) Hence the absence of any specific idols for prayer.

“What should we do?” I asked Siddharth.

“Whatever you want. This is between my mother and you. I am not a part of this!” - he was still sulking, obviously.

“Oh, come on! I am doing this for your well-being, remember?”

He looked at me with raised eyebrows, which was enough to signal that this line of reasoning would not fetch me any useful results.

“Please help! This sari is starting to get uncomfortable!” I immediately changed my tone as well as my argument.

This happened to work. He sighed and agreed to help me out. In a short while, he had found and printed a photo of Lord Shiva from the internet, which I duly pasted on the wall of a wooden cupboard built by our landlord as the pooja ghar - a place for prayer.

Dressed up in a nice pink sari, with Lord Shiva in front of my eyes, I was all set to pray. I closed my eyes, folded my hands, and bowed my head in front of the photo. I thought of singing a bhajan or an aarti praising Lord Shiva, and racked my brain to remember even two lines. But the only things that came back to me were images of Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz dancing on Jai Jai Shiv Shankarrrrr! And there I stood, with folded hands and bowed head, laughing away to glory.

Siddharth, who had been waiting for my prayers to get over so that we could have dinner, looked at me with expressions of utter disbelief on his face, shook his head, and went away. I quickly moved on with praying, without singing, of course, and finished with my usual prayer of thanking God for everything.

I had bought some laddoos from Dadu’s to pacify Siddharth, and that is one thing that never fails to cheer him up. So after the prayers, we had a vegetarian dinner followed by the mouth watering laddoos, post which Siddharth clicked a photo of us (as you can see, he refused to even dress in traditional clothes as a part of his rebellion), and sent it to our families. The subject said - Teej Compliance.
 

All smiles after eating laddoos

 And that was the story of my first Teej.

Finding Answers

“To all your problems, you are the only solution. To all your questions, you are the only answer.” - Anonymous

It is interesting how life never seems to really stabilize. After everything that you were hoping will provide stability to your life has been achieved, after a while, you are left wondering – okay, what next? I have been truly amazed with my latest experience in this regard.

The last four years of my life have revolved around one single theme – getting married. It had seemed like THE most important decision in life, with no room for error. And rightly so (ONE of the most important, in any case.) Therefore, it was a stressful experience to search for 'a suitable boy.' In those years filled with enormous fears of never meeting the right person to spend my life with, it had seemed that if I get this right, the rest of my life will more or less fall into place. So, when I did meet the right person, I was elated. It was like having found the Ultimate Answer (and the Ultimate Question) in one single package.

Unfortunately, that ecstasy lasted only for a few months. Not because I was not enjoying married life (which I still find quite wonderful,) but because with this major milestone behind it, my brain soon started bombarding me with a million other questions.

'Okay, so you have started a happy married life. But, what next? What is the purpose of your life? What are you doing with your life? Aren't you wasting your time doing something else when you want to do something entirely different? Whatever happened to your dreams? When was the last time you wrote something? When exactly do you plan to do something meaningful with your life, a topic you have been talking about forever? How will you feel about this life you are leading when you turn eighty? And by the way, do you think you will live to celebrate your eightieth birthday given your current lifestyle?'

These, and many other such questions started bothering me a few months after I got married. To find some solace, I started reading up on these subjects, and realized that there are many, many people out there who have had similar questions about their lives. The only difference is, quite a few of them have been taking action, and as a result, finding answers. And I would really like to become one such person.

Fortunately, at this point, the setting in my life is ideal for a massive change. I have a clear choice, that has been handed over to me on a platter. I am moving to a new country, and will have three months of purely guilt free time to do whatever I want, because it will take me that long to get a work permit. What I do in those three months, can change my life. I have some ideas, which I will talk about in subsequent posts. But the point of this post is that right in front of me lies a concrete opportunity to change my life, and I have absolutely no excuses of not having enough time, not knowing what to do, or anything else for that matter. The only question for which I need to find the answer right now is, am I brave enough to boldly go where I have not gone before?              

Of Friendships Lost and Found

When I was in the later years of school, “Friendship Day” was akin to a festival in my life. To not wish my friends on this day was unthinkable. If a friend forgot to wish me, it was unforgivable. I still remember spending hours looking through the shelves of the Archies Gallery in Baldev Plaza, searching for that perfect card, one which will give words to the sea of emotions I felt within me - the immense love and gratitude I felt for having the most amazing friends in the world. The only people who understood me, the only ones with whom I could discuss anything under the sun...I would spend hours on phone talking to them, much to the consternation of my family. And no matter how much my mother signalled for me to cut the conversation short (fearing the rising telephone bill, cost inevitably being a major concern in our middle-class family), I would continue, often falsely signalling back that it was the other person who had called me, and we were not being charged for the call. I had cherished those friendships and those people like nothing else in my life, and had always known that we will be best friends forever.

Which is why when some of those friendships didn’t last, it took me a long time to recover from the shock. May be it was my fault, may be it was theirs, or maybe the circumstances became too tough for our friendship to stand the test. Whatever be the reasons, the fact is that I lost touch with some of those friends over time, with which, the concept of “best friends forever” lost all meaning for me. Despite my initial disbelief, I eventually realized that like everything else in life, friendships also are ephemeral.

But just as we do not stop living life because we know it will end one day, it would be silly to stop making friends just because some of those friendships might not last forever. The friendships that didn’t last in my life, were enriching experiences nevertheless. They had a major role to play in making me the person that I have become today (and I really like this person, despite her imperfections.) If I had not learnt a thousand lessons during those friendships, and even after they ended, my life could have been very different. And in any case...it wouldn’t have been worth it to deprive myself of the joys of friendships, for as long as they lasted.

So, as school days gave way to college days and professional life, I made new friends. Contrary to the popular belief that one can’t find true friendships at the workplace, I have found some really dear friends in office. I also rediscovered some old friends, and renewed my friendships with them. Though the problems and challenges to be tackled kept changing with each stage of life, I was always fortunate enough to have some wonderful friends around me, to help me study during exams; to give me a pep talk and cheer me up at the time of heartbreaks; to tell me how my sorrow was nothing as compared to theirs, thus making me look at the brighter side of things in life; and as we collectively approached our thirties, to endlessly discuss the burning topic of marriage and how our parents and relatives seemed unable to understand us in this regard. Through all these years, though “Friendship Day” did not continue to be as big a festival in my life as it had been earlier, it did serve as a day to be grateful for my friends.

With the latest development of getting married slightly over a year ago, the time I spend with my friends has been on a decline. I no longer have frequent long conversations with them. We talk once in a while instead of the hourly long calls every other day, have quick “How are you doing?” chats on Whatsapp instead of spending the entire day on GTalk, send “Happy Birthday!” messages in the day instead of calling each other at 12 AM, and get to know a lot of stuff about each other from Facebook instead of “Hey, I have to tell you something!” phone calls.

There could be several reasons for this. Like me, most of my friends have either gotten married recently, or are likely to do so in the next few years. There is a definite shift in priorities after marriage - I know this from experience now. It has happened with me, and I am sure it would have happened with others too. So yes, my friends and I have been spending a little less time together now. But that does not mean that the importance of friends or friendship has decreased in my life. I still think about all my friends often, and would like to get better at keeping in touch.

I think all friendships evolve over time, and will undergo change. And though I don't anymore promise anyone that we will be best friends forever, I would like all my friends to know that I love them all, and I am there for them even if we have not spoken much lately. I wish you all a very Happy Friendship Day!