Your parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. Shouldn’t that be a wonderful occasion to get together and have a wonderful time? Family, friends, celebrations and so on. Unfortunately, when you’re the 26-year-old single daughter who has moved to the city to have one of those fancy careers (being at the beck and call of the associates of a law firm, not so fancy, really, but it’ll be worth it in five years), going home for a family gathering gives you nightmares. The nightmares, quite literally, start about a week before your flight is scheduled. Till then, there’s the uneasy feeling as you duck your aunts’ calls and make excuses that range from the plausible to the outrageous when your mum calls and asks why you’ve been ducking the calls. As the day of doom approaches, though, you start waking up in cold sweat having dreamt of a gaggle of aunts closing in on you intoning ‘You must get married, you must have babies, marry, marry, BABIES!’ by which time you mercifully open your eyes. You start hoping for airline strikes. You start hoping that your leave will get cancelled – what a difference from the last trip with friends to Goa, when you had fingers crossed that nothing would go wrong! Unfortunately, there is no escape from your fate, and there’s no escape from family gatherings unless you want to deeply hurt your parents. It’s not their fault that their sisters, sisters-in-law and cousins have babies – not their own, but your hypothetical babies – on their brains, is it? So the day of the flight home dawns, and you wish you could gird your loins much as gladiators did by the time you land. The first few minutes are wonderful. Your parents have nagged your brother-in-law into picking you up. Once you get home, you’ve got your adorable two-year-old niece all over you, and you get to be the best aunt of the year by giving her a few choice gifts, a couple not to be shown to her parents until she was done with them – sugar high, yes! As you hug her, you vow to yourself that you will be a better, less scary aunt to her than any of… Oh dear. There comes the gaggle. Loin-girding time. “Beta, you’re home! How long it has been!” “How is your job going? That’s a nice dress you’re wearing, but it’s a bit short, did you run out of material?” Strike one. “I guess you’re going to be all high-power lawyer and everything, eh? God help your husband if you argue like that at home as well!” Strike two. “You look so thin, you know, you should put on some weight, you will look nicer in that saree once you do. Then we’ll find a nice boy for you.” Strike three and you clench your fist… Aunt number three will never know how lucky she is that your sister came and pulled you into a hug before your fist made resounding contact with her face. So now to give your sister her belated birthday gift – a bottle of her favourite vodka, snagged from duty free the last time a friend went abroad. Still annoyed, you don’t think of sneaking off into your room before you give it to her. In a gesture of rather pointless defiance that will inevitably give them enough to gossip about for a week, you pull it out from your bag right in front of them. Cue collective gasp.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 02:15:49 +0000
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