For us men, once we hit 30, we’ll get attacked by long-range missiles, drones and nuclear bombs. Our relatives who have migrated to faraway lands will make it their daily ritual to skype our parents and remind them that their son needs to get married, or the world will end by this December.[break]
Neighbors who haven’t gotten along with your clan since the day your father purchased the land that you now reside in will have daily gossip sessions after lunch to figure out why the handsome lad next door is yet to find a mate. They will say stuffs like ‘He had a Kuireni wife in Amrika and two kids rey.’ One should take it as a compliment when your neighbors work on their conspiracy theories on why you still haven’t gotten hitched.
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I think most parents nowadays would rather leave it to their kids to find their other better halves themselves and enter into married life. But then, there will always be the ‘religious rightwing’ relatives and the ‘ultra-left’ cousins who always want their respective best for us.
The ‘religious’ rightwing want you to get married to the right caste, with the right background and, of course, with the right bank balance and adequate property holdings. Then we have the left-wing ultras who threaten to launch another people’s war if their cousins aren’t allowed to marry their lovers.
It’s tough to attend weddings these days when you are one of the few remaining earthlings among your high school friends not yet settled down. And whenever a member of the ‘still not married’ club decides to get hitched, then you worry about how to face the probe committee during the wedding party.
Your pot-bellied, half-balding, already-married, mid-level executive high school friends will start pulling your leg the moment you enter the party venue. They will make snarky comments like ‘Here comes the last of the Mohicans,’ ‘the Lone Ranger,’ ‘the ‘evergreen bachelor’ and the last one would have to be ‘Rajesh Hamal.’
Even Kollywood superstars are planning to get married by the end of this year while you are still trying to use Sigmund Freud-type analytical skills to figure out why your ex-girlfriend decided to dump you for a kuirey because she wanted to explore the world.
Hamal has acted in hundreds of movies while your dream of making that one ‘masterpiece’ hasn’t moved past the screenplay that you wrote when you were high with medicinal herbs back in 2003.
There will also be relatives who like to take the names of eminent personalities like Hamal or former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. And some will even go a step further and claim that ‘our cousin might turn out to be like the late Kishunji.’ But, of course, nobody’s really talking about you ruling Kollywood or the country someday.
It’s all got to do with how you will either end up alone and lonely or get married late; and by the time your kid passes their SLC exams with distinction, you’ll be using your walking stick to get around the neighborhood.
Some relatives will take your side and blame Hamal for not getting married. They still think I have time because Deuba did get married late. I still have a decade or two left before my relatives will take my name to scare the ‘younger’ cousins instead.
But you know very well that you can’t convince a woman that she’s getting married to a future prime minister or a Kollywood superstar because you really don’t possess any skills related to films or politics.
Then there are your relatives who have the best advice they can offer to help you straighten up your act and get ready for marriage. The one whose wife looks like she could walk the ramp somewhere in Milan or New York will advise you not to get married to a ‘beautiful’ woman.
But they say, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ Some like fair ladies, some like dark, some like tall women, some want their wives not too tall and not too short, just the medium. I wonder how they like their coffee as well.
We men don’t know what women want. We’ve banged our heads on the table whenever we’ve seen the ‘hot’ woman having dinner with her hairy-ugly-too-much-snuggly boyfriend. We ask the Almighty, ‘What did she see in him?’ and the answer will always be ”Whatever she didn’t see in you!’
Then there will be the relative who has married a rich man’s daughter and who reminds you ‘Never marry a rich girl’ or else she’ll will be the dominatrix and you’ll spend the rest of your life as a submissive slave. Well, somebody forgot to tell him that his so-called factory was funded by his in-laws, and so is the SUV he’s driving.
The writer is a desperate houseman.
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