Well, yesterday I met my old school friend who narrated me
three of his most horrifying stories where he had to evaluate girls to be his
potential wife in line with the doctrinal arranged marriage process. To give
you a background (Strictly my opinion), my friend is a sort of a combination of
3 characters: Catcher in the rye’s Holden Caulfield (but more grown-up),
English August’s Agastya Sen (but a little more complicated) and Tainspotting’s
Mark Renton (minus too much of drugs).
In two of the three horrifying stories, my friend’s
background had been due-diligenced on all the possible social platforms
(facebook./orkut/linkedIn and others we may not be aware of).
Girl1:
They met up in a crowded surroundings of India Gate where
she told him over the phone that he could recognize her as a girl eating a pink
icecream. To his dismay, there were plenty of girls eating icecream but with
different shades of pink. So he called her back to check what she was wearing and that’s
how he met her in her heavily dressed-up attire and gaudy make up that even if he consented to marry her, he would not recognise her on his eventful first night of marriage. She gave my friend a packed
gift to which he was utterly disgusted for not having brought a return gift. She
asked him to open the package she had gifted and he found out that the gift was a Sidney Sheldon’s book. He tried to hide
his evident sorrow expression at being gifted a Sideny Sheldon book and evaluated that no
gift is better than this gift. But then she quickly jumped up and said “hum jaante hain ki aapko padhno accha lagta
hai, humne FB pe dekha (I know you like reading, I saw it on FB)”.
Obviously, the
meeting went in a disaster because the girl’s ambition was to free-ride on her
husband’s money and have trips to Ooty, Darjeeling, Golden Temple, Vaishno Devi, Badrinath,
Kedarnath, Amarnath and several other Shiva temples (Shivji humaare favorite bhagwaan hain/ Shiva is my favourite God)
and she added humne fb par ye bhi dekha
hai ki aapko ghoomna bahut pasand hai
(I have also noticed it on FB that you like traveling)
Girl2:
She was one of the pretentious film arts students (a complete contrast
to Girl1) sponging on Dad’s money and was a self-proclaimed cool, arty, photographer clicking all
the sadhu babas, cows and the beggars on the road. He agreed to meet her
because she told him on phone (albeit with a put-on accent)- “Come dude, we will get high”. So they agreed to
meet at one of the most wannabe places in Delhi called Hauz Khas Village. After
they met and found a corner space to get-high, she took out from her bag all the
junkie stuff-grass, pink paper, powdery substance, liquids, syringes etc. He was
dumbfound at all the large syringes she took out and he was like “hey hey stop,
I cant take all this syring into my body”. She was shocked at his reaction and she injected one of the drugged syringe into her fully tattooed skin. Later, she started talking of how cool she
was and started mocking at his uncool job, his poor background,, his Hyundai i10 small car, his poor physique, his facebook
profile picture, his facebook cover picture, his absence from twitter. She took out her camera and showed
him the pictures she had clicked and he found them awful. He missed his earplugs as that shallow, verbose and insolent girl got more and more intolerable.
Girl3:
It has less to do with the girl3 whom he could not even meet but more with her kith and kin who dropped by his house to meet the guy. He had arranged his bachelor, unkempt house to his level best but as far as I know my friend the place even at his best would be below par in terms of neatness and cleanliness.
They dropped by to interview my friend of his credentials of keeping their girl happy where he was asked the capital of Andhra Pradesh and an arithmetic table of number 19. When he said he knew cooking, he was asked that when did one decide when rice had been fully cooked. He was asked certain embarrassing questions like was he a virgin and whether he smoked, drank, had any diseases, how much dowry was he expecting to which all the answers were satisfactory.
In reward they handed him a cash of rupees five thousand one and the phone number of girl number 3.
