Extract from Just Married, Please Excuse

(A Couple of Paras From the chapter: The First Date)

After we finished our otherwise uneventful, peaceful dinner, Vijay announced that he had organized for us to do some fishing, a thought that I was quite excited by. We settled ourselves comfortably on the cool stone steps leading into the river, and a friendly resort employee handed us our extremely make-shift fishing rods – which were actually just two thin bamboo sticks with strings, at the end of which dangled little hooks wrapped in bits of atta.

There we sat, the two of us, holding our charming and only slightly sad little fishing rods, and the conversation now took a more serious turn as we quietly exchanged our many divergent views on the world at large.

It was clear that despite our mutual attraction, we had too many differences – he referred to himself as a ‘simple man’ and was easy-going, good-humoured, and even-tempered. He also was a small-town boy, had been brought up as part of a conservative family in Jaipur and had a distinctly desi flavour. I on the other hand, was a ‘modern’, Delhi girl who had always had a bit of a hot temper and clearly favored Alanis over Amitabh.

He had just finished telling me about how he had always been told that he was one of the calmest and most centred people around, when he suddenly felt a tug on the bamboo stick. He stared at it in amazement while I excitedly cried that it looked like he had actually managed to hook a fish.

‘BHAIIYA! BHAIIYA!’ his sudden panicked screams shattered the stillness of the night. I asked him to calm down but he went on rather incoherently about being a Brahmin and a Vegetarian and how he had never thought these sticks would ever catch a fish and that he wanted to throw it back but couldn’t bring himself to touch it and anyway he was afraid it would bite him and it looked so awful struggling there like that and so on. The friendly resort Bhaiiya came back and laughingly rescued Vijay from the fi sh, tossing the latter back into the river whereupon it indignantly swam away. Vijay shuddered and said we should head back into town now.

And that was our first date.