I have observed that most women who are 40+ and are housewives have one big ambition in common: matchmaking. May be it is due to the lack of any other activity (the kids are mostly grown up by this time in a woman’s life) or maybe it is due to the genetic craze of the fairer sex about gossiping. Any women fitting this description and reading this, excuse me.
I had the (mis)fortune of one such neighbor during a long journey. One glance at her and I knew that it was dangerous to even say a hello – it would have opened a long list of useless enquiries. But this one was tougher; she started the conversation on the pretext of borrowing my pen.
“Are you a Punjabi?” She asked.
“No”. (Not everyone with a Delhi ticket in his hand is a Punjabi; I said it silently of course!)
“You got a job in Delhi?”
The answer to this question is difficult; so I uttered a meaningless ‘hmm’; let her made her own assumptions about whether it meant yes or no. She went on asking questions about everything she had no business with. And then, the most fearful one: Are you married?
I said no and her eyes lit up; like Sehwag’s when he sees a full toss. She was apparently some sort of a fixer in her family; having successfully paired some 13-14 marriages (as per her admission, I had no interest in verifying these statistics). She then asked me why I was not married yet to which I jokingly said that it might be so as unfortunately I did not have her services at my disposal. Big mistake. Big F’ing mistake!
“Tell me about your preferences about the girl”, she said, “Language?”
“Doesn’t matter; as long as she speaks English”, I said.
“Caste?”
“Doesn’t matter”.
“Profession, education?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Age?”
“Less than or equal to mine. In fact, on second thoughts, even that doesn’t matter.”
“So what matters?”
“Umm … she should be fit and good looking.”
“Is that your criteria? That’s nothing, decide something specific.”
“Ok, she better be a Victoria’s Secret Angel!”
“What?” Aunty had a puzzled look on her face. Clearly, Victoria’s Secret is going to be a lifelong secret for her.
“Nothing, I was kidding. I don’t have much of criteria”, I said.
“See, that’s why you are unmarried. You lack clarity. Someone needs to help you draw criteria and then fix a match accordingly”, aunty said in winning tone as if she had solved the world’s origin mystery.
Lacking clarity?? I mean, am I buying a chicken for meal that I should have rigid a criteria about color, height, breed, weight and all (by the way, I have never bought a chicken but I know that meat-loving people have some criteria like this when they select the bird at the butcher’s shop)!? And even with such simple and open criteria, if I am still unmarried then God knows what would happen if I had a detailed to 10th decimal point requirement stencil as required by her – may be I would give Salman Khan a competition by remaining unmarried for the longest duration of time :P ... Poor chap used to face such questions every now and then on his TV game show.
“I already have a few shortlists in my mind for my niece; she likes cricket, reads a lot and is the leader of her college’s dance group. I just need to tweak the habits of my shortlisted boys a bit to make them compatible with hers.”
“Well, actually you don’t need to tweak anything. Just put them together and let the natural chemistry work out for itself! And going by her description, do add me to your shortlist”, I said.
“You are joking”, she said.
I was about to say no but luckily, her non-stop talk ended because the thing such aunties love the most, second only to matchmaking, arrived: food!
