Tuesday, March 13, 2007

A Farewell to Bachelorhood

"Snap taken by Chris"


The unthinkable has happened: after leading a singularly single life for quarter of a century, I'm planning to get coupled by extreme emotional stressed applied by my friend Chris who has been my Queen Bee for quiet a long., who softly tiptoed into my heart over the past 6yrs, persuaded me to renounce my solitary ways and join the great matrimonial majority. Actually, 'persuaded' might be the wrong word; it implies a surrender of will accompanied by a sigh of resignation, like so many demoralized Aztecs renouncing their feathered gods and converting to Catholicism. (Those helmeted knights who knew how to be persuasive.) No such thing happened here. What startled both of us, in the end, is that the proposal slipped happily and voluntarily from my lips -- no cajoling, no arm-twisting, no threats of bodily dismemberment just 6months of thought process and lot of feed back from recently tamed Kamal. Oh boy falling in love marrying the one you love is not that bad atleast that’s what the glow on Kamals face reveals. Recent polls predicts girls want us to dress up something like him, winning this poll was a cake walk for him with almost all the soul from the fairer sex voting for him, why not to follow him in the matrimonial section too. In a sudden flash of insight I beheld delightful visions of wedlock in the company of my Chris, and those visions seemed to glow brighter and more steadily than the open-air circus of bachelorhood. I promptly knelt on a pile of unopened mail in my living room and popped the question.
Ah, bachelorhood. I feel as if I'm taking leave of an old friend -- a quirky and occasionally morose friend, but a friend all the same. What will I miss about it? The traditional bachelor mode of dining, for one. Single people enjoy the inalienable right to eat anything, at any time, in any room of the house, without someone to bug. Ice cream is ALWAYS eaten directly from the carton, without guilt or ice cream dishes. In fact, I've dispensed with dishes of any kind; to be honest it’s been 6 months since I last heard how the cooker whistles. About 6 years ago I took the ultimate step toward bachelor-friendly accommodations (my college hostel and present one after a short stint with my parents: eat everything on the bed, smoke and sleep … Padma aunty is always there to clean it up in the morning. College hostel was better you don’t need to go till Loo, crawl till the balcony and water the garden below, which wife will ever allow her husband such liberty which my solitude as a stag did? How many married men can boast of such a gloriously unfettered and efficient arrangement? It pains me to give it up.
As a single guy, I've also enjoyed the freedom to seek my recreations spontaneously and without consideration for the emotional needs of a resident life-mate. I can watch old Popeye cartoons or werewolf movies with impunity; I can listen to Jim Morrison on my stereo without causing a minor riot; I can linger at my computer until 2 a.m., I can drink coffee or tea at any time and then use the same cup as an ash tray. I can clutter my abode with all manner of artifacts culled from my long and fruitful bachelor years: all the clothes on one chair with lizard shitting on it in competition with the spiders weaving their webs. And of course, books everywhere. Shelves of books... desks and file cabinets topped with books... books next to the bed... Books ON the bed... books piled on top of books. No married man can arrange such exuberantly unfeminine interior space and live to tell about it. I know full well that my bare-breasted-goddess and books-on-the-bed days are numbered.
What about the bachelor's freedom to fall in love, you might ask. Surely I'll miss the prospect of fresh romance lurking in the next visit to Forum or MG road, bewitching eyes enticing me from an adjoining restaurant table, a lone kindred soul encountered on a darkened train while going home. But as a wise friend once advised me, that sort of life always reads better than it plays. I'd bet that most bachelors spend their prime years, as I did, longing for those heavenly accidental meetings that never materialize. My own romantic karma was famously bad; whenever I'd enter a cafe or bar with a reputation for attracting uncommon women, those fine-boned females instinctively knew enough to scatter just before I arrived on the scene. It didn't help, either, that I spent my prime bachelor years marooned fighting for my right to have a girl friend…
Still I attempted to extract some classic bachelor pleasures from my provincialized life. I ventured on solitary vacations with the hope of discovering romance at the hotel, on the hiking trail, go any where bachelors like me always exercise their right to fall in love. When I was growing up I'd envy the charmed lives of single men as envisioned by Moviedom: Richard Gere courting ravishing Julia in Pretty woman... taxi driver Amir Khan squiring princess Karishma Kapoor around hill station...King Khan going till Switzerland to woo Juhi chawla. What impossible, treacherous and misleading fantasies the screenwriters had concocted! What a thumping letdown when my own single life played out more like the annals of the Yeh meri manzil to nahi!
I don't mean to imply that my bachelorhood was the social equivalent of Kazakhstan. I enjoyed a modest but rewarding share of romance and adventure. And when I did find romance, it was never while giving a lift to a mmmm, or taxing through hill station, or singing “Jadoo teri nazar”. It was generally through friends who had the grace and good sense to introduce me to one of THEIR friends -- a woman who had the happy misfortune to be unattached at the same time I was. I'm going to marry one of those women, the most endearing and eloquent of the lot -- my own Chris. I'm sacrificing the splendors of bachelorhood for her, and I'm hoping she'll be kind enough to let me wear my lucky pair of jeans without washing it for months in a row.

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