Done-dana-done

May 17, 2013

Sowmya Rajendran GBM, Parenting, Pregnancy/Labour/Breastfeeding 26 Comments

***

I’m done breastfeeding GBM. Yippie. I stopped on the fourteenth of this month – that’s 18 months of being a dairy cow and drinking orange juice only. M is apparently going to buy me jewelry in honour of the services rendered and all.

I was very pro-breastfeeding till I actually started breastfeeding. When I was pregnant, M and I signed up for prenatal classes and a lactation consultant was one of the people who handled the sessions. She was very positive about breastfeeding and its benefits (obviously) and I was fully sold on the idea that breast is best and formula is evil. I also assumed that breastfeeding would be easy – I mean, it’s natural, right? All you have to do is position the baby correctly and it’s going to do its job. I read a lot about pregnancy, labour, and delivery but I didn’t read much on what comes afterwards. It’s like being ready for the wedding but not for the marriage.

M and I made a joint decision that I would breastfeed till at least a year and we wouldn’t give the baby any formula. So when the pediatrician asked the nurse to give the baby formula soon after birth – she assumed I wouldn’t want to feed since I’d had a C-sec after a very long labour and it was 11.15 PM when I delivered- M refused to let the nurse do so. A lot of C-sec babies are born slightly dopey because of the anesthesia but GBM was wide awake and already sucking on the cloth they’d wrapped her in. By the time I was brought into the room in my stretcher, she was ravenous.

I put her to my breast, feeling very maternal though I was so exhausted. She latched on immediately. But she was one hot-headed monkey. If she didn’t get what she wanted IMMEDIATELY, she’d turn red and scream like there was no tomorrow. She would scream so much that I was terrified of her. Because of the operation, I was not supposed to sit up, so it was really difficult to hold her while feeding. This meant that all the other well-meaning people in the room tried to help, only making GBM madder and madder.

I was sure I was going to be awarded World’s Worst Mother any second. The first night at the hospital was a nightmare. I really thought I’d go deaf with all the screaming she did. The duty nurses were pro-formula and one of them even told me that my body didn’t have the ability to feed my baby, so I should just give formula. I knew I was producing colostrum and that this was very essential for the baby, so I gave her a stony stare and said no. I had just been through a revelation of how wonderful my body was and its amazing endurance in those long hours of labour and I had new respect for it.

The next day, my gynec (who has my eternal gratitude), taught me how to breastfeed after chucking everyone out of the room and telling me that I just had to trust myself. I began to get comfortable with the idea of breastfeeding after that. I mean, at least, I gained some confidence that I wasn’t completely useless at it. Later, a nurse told me that the medical staff in the hospital was mighty impressed by my commitment to breastfeeding and that the duty doctors were all praising me. I felt like someone had given me the medal I felt I so deserved.

I’d never held a newborn or any kind of baby before GBM. I’m not one of those people who can pick up random babies and coochie-coo. I like kids but not ALL kids. I was afraid of handling GBM and I would quickly give her off to M or my mum to burp her every time I fed her. M was comfortable holding GBM the second she was born. I don’t know how but he just was. He was the one who bathed her when she was that tiny and knew by instinct just what to do.

The first month or so, GBM would want to feed every 1.5 hours. Day and night. And we were also idealistic parents who used only cloth nappies. This meant that she’d pee and poop while feeding, would have to be changed mid-way, get super-angry, and then feed with a vengeance. I was so sure I was going to die of exhaustion. If her feed time was a bit delayed, I’d have my clothes soaked in breastmilk and I’d have to go change. Not fun. It was impossible to go out anywhere because I was forever worried that she’d get hungry and I’d have to feed her in public – she wasn’t a quiet feeder and I was quite sure I’d never be comfortable feeding her without privacy.

After this period, we sort of settled down. I began to trust myself as a mother. I got comfortable carrying her, comforting her. Loving her. It was still exhausting but I was gaining confidence. I’d earlier thought I’d introduce her to solids after six months but around four months, I thought she was ready. She was showing interest in the food we were eating and was able to support her neck without any issues. When she was four and a half months old, I introduced her to raagi.

Now I thought this would give me a break from breastfeeding but introducing solids brought with it its own set of problems. By then, my mum had left and I had no help with the baby. So this meant that I’d have to cook the food, cajole GBM into eating it, and clean her up after that. And if she refused to eat, breastfeed her. It was another kind of exhaustion. GBM is actually not fussy at all (in retrospect) but she was my first experience with babies and every time she didn’t eat solids, I’d end up wondering if she’d EVER stop breastfeeding.

Once, I was just waiting for M to come home at six and relieve me because GBM had refused to eat and I was so tired. I heard his car come in and I was waiting for the door to open so I could just give her to him and take a break. I waited and waited but he didn’t come. I peeped out of the window and he was chatting with a neighbour. I felt unbelievably furious and I actually called him on his phone and asked him to come at once. But M who has developed Himalayan levels of patience after becoming a father didn’t get pissed at all. He told me to go if I wanted to and I went for a long walk and came back feeling peaceful.

Around six months or so, I bought a breast pump because we were going to Chennai and I wanted to be able to go out and meet my friends. This was a good decision and I did have some baby-less outings. But I never used the pump much when we were back home. It just seemed to be too much of a pain to wash and sterilize for every feed. It was just additional work for me. I also felt too pressurized every time I pumped – maybe I’d have become more comfortable with it if I’d done it often enough, who knows.

Anyway, at around 8 months or so, GBM took to solid foods very well and I started dropping feeds. Just after she turned a year old, we traveled to Delhi (I was part of Bookaroo, the children’s books festival) and I would feed her once in the morning (if she was awake when I left) and once at night. Prior to this, she would wake up frequently at night because she was teething and demand feeds but on the advice of the pediatrician, we gave her sugar water instead of breastmilk – she’d have a good dinner, so it wasn’t hunger, just the need to chew on something!

Finally, when she was about 15 months old, I dropped the bedtime feed and would feed her only once a day. As she began to like and eat more and more solid foods, I reduced the time she spent on feeding. At around 17 months, I started joking to her about how she was ‘chumma chumma’ feeding and she’d laugh because she knew it was true – she didn’t really need it but was feeding just for comfort. And finally, on the 14th of this month, I told her that the time for ‘chumma chumma’ had ended because she was now a big girl and she can drink mango milkshake instead. Woohoo. She thought that was funny too and is happy with her straw bottle now.

I was able to breastfeed GBM for so long probably because I work from home. I’m pretty sure I’d have given up a long time ago if I had to work outside and pump in office spaces. I also had no medical issues or problems with supply. And though GBM started teething quite early and was a biter in the initial stages, she quickly gave it up after I told her firmly biting was not on.

In retrospect and after reading the experiences of other mothers, I don’t believe formula is evil or shouldn’t be given to the baby at all at any stage. There are plenty of formula-fed kids who seem to be doing just fine.

Breastfeeding is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t know how beneficial it has been – my daughter has never been ill for more than a couple of days and never seriously -is that because of the immunity I gave her by feeding? Or is it because she takes after me in this department? I almost never catch a cold, so maybe it’s just her genes. I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s been a tough journey and one that has made me laugh even harder every time someone says women are of the weaker sex. Son, you’ve no idea what you are talking about. Now, where’s my vodka?

God’s Passport – 3

May 16, 2013

Sowmya Rajendran Angst 6 Comments

***

Read God’s Passport Part 1 and Part 2.

God went back home from the passport office feeling marginally victorious. ‘Nobody is allowed to touch my cell phone from now on,’ she told her children. She wanted them to ask why but they were not interested in conversation.

God sighed and went to her room with her patchy phone. The passport office had told her that the police would send her a text message when they were coming to verify her address. God found human communication methods to be intriguing. The more she observed, the more astounded she was by how much ‘talking’ happened without anyone ever opening their mouths.

Her children were on something called Facebook and they kept talking about Angry Birds, a species she had not created. ‘Where do the Angry Birds live?’ she had asked once and her eldest had given her a withering look. The Angry Birds were there everywhere. On their bags, on their water bottles, on their bedspreads. God didn’t understand it.

Every day she checked her phone, hoping to see the text from the police but her inbox was empty. God often sent herself a text message just to make sure her phone was working and nothing was wrong with her network. Technology was strange. It was all supposed to work by logic but it seemed to her that it depended more on chance than anything else. Her husband hit the remote against the sofa to make it work again…and it did. Now where was the logic in that?

When days turned into weeks and God did not hear from the police, she went to the police station to find out what had happened to her application. There was a booth that said ‘Passport Varification’ and God stood in the queue with the others who had all come with their plastic folders. God hadn’t thought of bringing her plastic folder. Hadn’t they already seen her documents? She suddenly felt naked without her folder.

When her turn came, the policeman gave her a huge pile of applications and asked her to check if her application was there in it. God searched nervously. Ah. There it was! At the end of the pile. God looking at the camera with suspicion.

‘Here it is!’ she said, waving the application at the policeman. ‘Hokay,’ he said. ‘Now take two copy jerox of all this documents and come at 5 PM. Bring original also.’ He pointed at a board that had a long list of documents.

‘But I’ve already submitted jerox..I mean photocopies of all these documents to the passport office,’ God said, exasperated.

‘This is the procedure. No jerox, no passport,’ said the policeman gleefully. God walked out of the police station feeling quite annoyed. She did not understand the human need to photocopy everything. People photocopied all their documents once, twice, thrice, arranged them in different bundles and then forgot about them. Why is it so important to them, God wondered.

One of the documents needed was Neighbour Refrance Letters. God’s husband persuaded the old man next door and the suspicious aunty upstairs to sign letters that said God indeed resided in these premises and that she was of good character.

God took the letters and all her other documents to the photocopier. She watched hypnotized as the machine spat out multiples of her documents with such efficiency. God was inspired. Maybe in the next planet she created, life could reproduce this way. You lie down on a machine when the urge to reproduce strikes you and voila! You have a copy of yourself.

God arranged all her documents in the plastic folder and went to the police station at 4.45 PM. The Passport Varification booth was closed. She asked another officer when the cop would come and he told her that the cop was away at ‘CM duty’.

‘When will that get over?’ asked God. ‘God knows,’ said the officer, walking away.

God waited on the bench for two hours with her plastic folder. There were moments in that long wait when she wanted to do her terrible dance and reduce the earth to dust, but she forced herself to stay calm. The station filled up with other passport applicants. The boy who had applied in tatkal but still hadn’t got his passport because the last time he came, his jerox copies were not clear enough. The baby who was screaming for milk and its harassed mother. The old man who waited as if he had turned to stone. The children who played in the mud, unmindful of their tired parents.

At last, the policeman came. When it was God’s turn, the policeman asked her sharp questions.

‘What is your name?’

‘God..Godavari.’ (God was rather proud of this clever human name she’d picked for herself.)

‘Mole on left eyebrow? Show where?’

God turned her head to the side so the policeman could see it.

‘Hmm,’ said the policeman. ‘Hokay. Come tomorrow at 8 PM.’

‘But why?’ asked God. ‘Isn’t it over? I’ve given all the documents and jerox also. What more do you want?’

‘Inspector has to sign on your photo in the application. Only then we can forward it to the passport office,’ said the policeman frowning. Why was this lady asking so many questions? Maybe she was Lashkar-e-Taiba. The policeman looked at his watch. He was too tired to pursue this line of thought.

God came back the next day at 8 PM. She had brought with her a book and a packet of Lays. She waited for the inspector to come. The others were there too – the boy, the baby, the old man, the children, the parents. God felt at one with the people. She closed her eyes and counted the seconds. The boom boom of Time marching past her.

At last, the inspector arrived. When it was God’s turn, the inspector asked her for her name and then signed across her photograph. ‘Is it over now?’ God dared to ask. ‘You have verified my address?’ ‘Yes,’ said the policeman. ‘Now we will send it to passport office and they will send it to you.’

‘By when will that happen?’ asked God.

‘Too many questions,’ said the policeman. ‘Just wait, hokay?’

God looked at his weather-beaten face. The owl glasses. The dark circles under his eyes. The stale sweat darkening his khaki uniform.The nervous rustle of plastic folders and fluttering photocopies falling from clumsy hands. And suddenly, out of nowhere, the tears fell from God’s eyes and it began to rain.

***the end

God’s Passport -2

May 13, 2013

Sowmya Rajendran Angst 15 Comments

***

Read God’s Passport Part 1 here.

For address proof, God had her husband’s passport and her marriage certificate. Her husband had been human before he met her and he still carried around his old documents to remind him of his humble origins. Being God’s husband still felt a little unreal to him.

But at the passport office, God was told her husband’s passport was no good as it didn’t have her enlisted as his spouse. ‘But this marriage certificate proves we’re married!’ said God, not understanding. ‘Yes,’ said the passport officer patiently. ‘But marriage certificate is accepted as proof only for the marital status on your passport. It’s not address proof.’

God thought about this. ‘If my husband had me listed as spouse in his passport, then you’ll accept his passport as my address proof?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said the passport officer.

‘So for him to enlist me as spouse, which document will you use?’ she asked.

‘Marriage certificate,’ said the passport officer impatiently. Couldn’t this woman see she was holding up the queue?

‘So what you are saying is that you will accept the marriage certificate as proof to change his marital status. And after that has been done, you will accept his passport as my address proof. But I can’t use his passport and my marriage certificate and get an address proof?’ asked God, bewildered.

‘Yes,’ said the passport officer. How thick-headed was this woman?

‘Okay,’ said God meekly. She could have chosen to burn the passport officer down by opening her third eye but she was determined not to be a bully. She’d recently been reading a lot of Marxist theory and though Marx said she didn’t exist, he’d hit a nerve when he’d gone on about unequal power relations.

‘Come with Light Bill, 1 year Bank Statement, Aadhar Card, Ration Card or something like that,’ said the passport officer. Then, he said in a categorical voice, ‘Next.’

God came out of the passport office with her stupid plastic folder, feeling thoroughly abashed. She didn’t have a Light Bill, obviously. She’d just said ‘Let there be Light’ and there it was. She didn’t have any of those cards either. Her husband had a Ration Card but that was of no use because her name wasn’t enlisted in his passport as spouse.

She went home and snacked on a wicked rakshasa. ‘This TV sucks,’ said her eldest who was sitting on a frog, his choice of vehicle. ‘If I keep the door of the balcony open, the screen gets a glare,’ complained the youngest. He was seated on a pumpkin. ‘Quiet!’ said God in a dangerous voice. Her husband came into the drawing room with a DVD of MGR songs in it. He’d been thrilled to find out that his old box of DVDs was still there in the house, as he’d left it.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, when he saw God’s face. God told him all that had happened.

‘But we have a joint account!’ said her husband with exasperation. Really, just because you were God, it wasn’t cool to not know where all the money was. He’d opened one for the two of them when they’d got married. God had not been above hoodwinking humans then, so she’d allowed him to forge all the documents.

‘Money is the Evil God of Israel,’ said God loftily.

Her husband knew better than to argue. He went to the bank and got God her address proof. The bank was a private one and was run by profit-motivated soul-suckers, so they gave the husband the document he wanted within twenty minutes.

‘I’m now invincible,’ God thought, as she put the address proof inside her folder.

After several weeks, God was finally able to schedule another appointment. The passport officer and two of his seniors tried their best to find a loophole by which they could deny God an application but God had it all covered.

Then, seeing the smug expression on God’s face, the senior-most officer said, ‘Fine. But your passport requires police verification.’

‘What is that?’ asked God, her confidence suddenly dipping.

‘The police will come and check if you really do live in the same address,’ said the first passport officer.

‘If they were anyway going to do that, why did you need all these documents?’ asked God, confused.

‘It’s the procedure,’ said the middle-level officer importantly.

***to be continued

God’s Passport

May 13, 2013

Sowmya Rajendran Angst 11 Comments

***

God was planning to travel. She was pretty bored of sitting up there in the high heavens and watching endlessly beautiful fountains. What God needed was a vacation. She decided that she would take the form of a human being, a woman (married with two kids), and travel the world.

So God arrived on Earth, to a country called India, with her husband and two kids. The children were not too excited about leaving their large screen television and going to a place that had significantly smaller TV screens but when God ordained something, there was little one could do. Since she was on vacation, God did not want to perform any attention-drawing miracles like flying in the air, walking on water etc to travel.She decided to do it the human way. For this, she learnt she had to obtain a passport.

God found out that the first step for doing so was to schedule an appointment at the passport office on the Internet. The Internet was wonderful, God thought. There was nothing that the Internet did not know or could not solve. On some days, she nearly got an inferiority complex thinking about it.

God was told that she’d have to log in to the site between 12 noon to 3 PM to schedule an appointment. On the first day, God logged in at 1 PM after a delicious lunch. To her astonishment, she found that all the slots were already taken! On the second day, God logged in at 12.05 PM (her BSNL connection helpfully conked out at 11.55 AM and she had to run to find a net center). To her chagrin, God saw that in five minutes, all the slots had been filled.

God took this personally. She had never felt more defeated in life. The next day, God logged in at 11.55 AM and clicked on the ‘Schedule Appointment’ button, feeling very triumphant. She was told she was too early. But when she tried at 12 noon, she was told she was too late. This went on for a few more days till one glorious afternoon when suddenly, God was able to fix an appointment. ‘It’s a miracle!’ God exclaimed. She couldn’t believe her luck.

God was a very organized person and she made a list of all the documents she had to procure. She went to the passport office with a plastic folder, feeling very efficient.

*** to be continued

Just Read

May 9, 2013

Sowmya Rajendran Literature 1 Comment

***

I’ve just finished reading Sophie Says by Judy Balan and My Brother’s Wedding by Andaleeb Wajid. Both writers share the great honour of being friends with me on Facebook, so I’m going to review their books together.

Okay, okay, I’m reviewing them together because they both give voice to contemporary female Indian experiences. Is that academic-sounding enough? Most writers resent being slotted into categories, but I’m going to go ahead and piss these two off by putting them in the chick-lit category – and before you get your hackles raised, Jane Austen would be considered chick lit too if she’d been writing today. Because her central characters are female and they aren’t serving in the war or busy dying in the Industrial Revolution.

Sophie Says is about Sophia, the girl my parents were afraid I was going to become. You know, unmarried, full of weird theories, with a ‘reputation’ hanging around me like a noose. I’m convinced my parents tricked me into a black magic session with a specialized priest from Kerala to turn me into what I am today – (mostly) happily married with a baby to boot, but I digress.

Sophie has a popular blog (Sophie Says) in which she writes about her relationship theories which are heavily influenced by her real life experiences. She is commitment phobic, lives by herself, and isn’t a virgin *gasp*. She is cool with open relationships and is cynical about happily-ever-afters. But Sophie isn’t as chilled out as she thinks she is because when she is accosted by a bunch of well-meaning aunties who want to know just what she means by enjoying life so much, she blurts out that she is actually seeing someone. To keep up the lie, Sophie ends up procuring a fake boyfriend called Ryan (who is obviously mouth-watering). Ryan thinks Sophie’s relationship theories are shit and proceeds to convince her about them (and as Sophie will admit, he’s pretty persuasive with all the kissing he does).

Just as we’re settling down for a sunset moment, in walks Yatan, Sophie’s someday boy. Yatan and Sophie go a long way back – they are the best of friends, have slept with each other, and are male-female versions of essentially the same person. So when Yatan gets territorial about Sophie, does she pick him over Ryan? Or is Ryan with his unfashionable ideas about relationships what she needs?

Sophie Says discusses many kinds of relationships – the cloying ones, the doomed ones, the dangerous ones, the clueless ones, the we-dunno ones and many more. The blog posts will sound familiar if you’ve read Judy’s blog but I still enjoyed reading them because I’m now at that stage when I want to wallop anyone who is wasting five hours every night talking to their boyfriend when they could be sleeping. At places, I thought the narrative was a little slow and repetitive but overall, Sophie Says is an enjoyable read. We don’t have that many books yet that chronicle the ordinary lives of urban Indian women in a celebratory way and Sophie Says is a welcome addition to the canon. All of us who have lived in terror of becoming a homely photograph on Shaadi.com are likely to identify with Sophie.

A while ago, I read The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl by Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra. Saba, the protagonist in My Brother’s Wedding, could very well have featured in one of its chapters. The Good Indian Girl (GIG) is vanilla on the outside but is a woman who is fifty shads of grey (heh) once you dig a little deeper. Being a GIG is about picking your subterfuge wisely and which of us hasn’t done it at least once? Saba’s brother is getting married and she starts a blog to bitch about how annoying the whole thing is – right from the girl-seeing to the shopping to the…oh, wait a minute, who is that hot boy who just walked into her horizon? Uzair from London, yo! Uzair who walks into a forbidden room full of women, unmindful of the scandal he’s causing. Saba is smitten and decides she must have his number. But how is a GIG to do that?

Ask the other guy who’s interested in her, of course. Shahid, Saba’s cousin (DISTANT, the book isn’t about incest, relax), who is Mr. Dependable. Shahid is also in love with Saba but he helps her out because, well, he’s Mr.Dependable. In the mean time, Rabia, Saba’s sister who has a Cleopatra complex, runs into marital trouble. She isn’t head over heels in love with her husband the way he is with her and to make matters worse, Rabia discovers she’s pregnant. Everyone in the family seems to be going nuts, including Saba’s brother, who suddenly decides he wants to call off the wedding.

In the middle of all this drama, Saba discovers things about herself that she didn’t know (like she’d be the type of girl who could kiss in full public view or that she wants to study further and take her writing seriously). Should she obey the rules laid down by her conservative family or will she be brave enough to go against convention? Saba is a believable heroine because she’s neither a flag waving rebel nor a doormat you want to throttle. Her dilemmas are bound to be familiar, even if you are a fake rock chick type like Sophie.

While Sophie Says has a sitcom feel to it (and I think this was deliberate because the chapter heads begin with The One With the…), My Brother’s Wedding is a more structured, plot-driven book where the ends are tied up neatly and you know where most things stand. Sophie and Saba might seem worlds apart but they are really women you’ve met sometime in life. They might even be thick friends and there wouldn’t be anything odd about that.

Cinderella’s Daddy

May 3, 2013

Sowmya Rajendran Literature, Movies 8 Comments

***

I’ve finally finished reading the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Yes, it’s repetitive, cheesy, boring, and you really want to wring the neck of Anastasia Steele by the time it’s over, but it is also a publishing phenomenon and I will say it – it’s readable. And not because of all the sex in the book – those are probably the very pages you will skip because you already know they are both going to explode into a million atoms or whatever all the time. It’s almost as if EL James put down a list of the number of places one could have sex in and ticked them off one by one. Elevator? Done. Parking lot? Done.

After this, I read Psycho. Maybe it was an association of ideas thing because Christian Grey reminded me of Dexter, who was also left with his mom’s dead body for a few days and therefore became a little unhinged, to put it mildly. And Dexter is my favourite TV psycho (all time favourite psycho is of course, Hannibal Lecter).

I haven’t watched Hitchcock’s Psycho but I guessed the plot of the book right away. I mean, I’d just finished reading some 1500 pages on what a messed up mummy can do to a child, so figuring out the plot was easy-peasy.

Then it struck me, why is it that all these weirdos have only mommy problems? Why don’t the fathers get blamed? Where the hell are these fathers, that’s what I’d like to know. It starts with the fairy-tale. Remember Cinderella’s father? You don’t? Right. That’s because the bloke is never there in the story. He’s either away on a ‘voyage’ or he’s dead. But my favourite is the father from Hansel and Gretel. How he tearfully leaves his biological children in the woods because his new wife insists that he does so. And we’re all supposed to feel sorry for him. Yeah, right.

Why don’t we have films or books in which the kid is stuck with the father’s dead body for three days, I want to know. Is a female dead body scarier than a male dead body? Is the death of a father any less damaging than the death of a mother? And why is it that all these ‘damaged’ kids are boys? Why is this enough to justify their appalling behaviour? This is probably one reason I really liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (*spoiler alert*)- because Lisbeth Salander refuses to acquit the psycho in the book over his terrible past. His sister shared that past, too, she points out. And she didn’t do what he did.

Then we have all these films in which a boy gets ‘seduced’ by an older woman and then he ends up hating all women blah blah and he goes around killing all of them. Going by this logic, every woman in India should be a raving psycho, what with our happy introduction to molestation beginning even before our introduction to the alphabet.

Maybe that’s why I like Hannibal Lecter. Okay, so his problem is that he ate his sister without knowing he did so, but at least, he didn’t eat his mum, you know?. His mum, bless the good woman, is out of the picture. Dr Lecter is always charmingly original about everything, don’t you agree?

I look forward to the day when I can read a psycho-thriller book about a girl (preferably Indian) who was raped by her father and who therefore turned into a man-killing machine. The first half of that story is there in your newspaper. Why is the second half so hard to imagine?

Evolution

May 1, 2013

Sowmya Rajendran Children, Marriage, Rajini 12 Comments


***
M has become very difficult to annoy these days. I was feeling really irritated because it’s so hot and I thought I’d irritate him for a while so we could be irritated together. But nothing I tried worked. Wow. I’m in a mature marriage officially.

Have you watched Baasha? If you haven’t, you wouldn’t have lost much in life but it has a rather nice song about autos. In the first half of the movie, there’s this major scene in which Baasha is tied up to a lamp-post and a local goon beats the shit out of him. But Baasha keeps laughing. His perplexed brother asks him, ‘Do you never get angry?’ Of course, that only makes Baasha laugh even more, through the blood and all. But towards the end, Baasha becomes his Superstar self complete with air-whipping gestures and all.

I told M that he’s like Baasha in reverse.

M in the first year:
baasha1

M currently:
baasha2
How did this transformation occur, I wonder. We used to fight about all sorts of things. For instance, I once said M’s nose is like that of a proboscis monkey’s and he got very offended. I didn’t intend it as an insult at all and I got very offended that he got very offended. And then there was a big fight about it. I know, it sounds very LKG, but that’s how much we used to fight. Now, if I actually do say something offensive, fully intending to offend also, M only gives a Baasha laugh.

Maybe it’s do with the daughter and how we’ve both realized that the biggest problems in life are not America’s foreign policy but changing a diaper without getting anything under your fingernails. Phew, this is probably why Wise Elders tell you to make babies fast, eh? These days, when there’s a fight around the corner, what we both do is come to this amicable conclusion: ‘Okay, so we’re going to fight about this and not speak and blah blah. Why not go for a drive and get take-out and watch Ugly Betty or something equally brain-dead instead?’ We lay down the arms and give Peace a chance. Full on Aman ki Asha, what?

I asked M why he doesn’t get annoyed with my attempts to annoy him any more and he said it’s because he’s realized I’m loony. I suppose I should be offended by that, but I’m not. I’m also laughing like Baasha. I’ve just sung Andha Baasha paaru Baasha paaru for forty minutes trying to put my daughter to sleep and I have my priorities right.

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