JUST BEFORE MARRIAGEAs the title suggests it is something about someone’s marriage. You go, make merry, laugh upon idiot looking well dressed couple, make a few remarks about not so good food, meet old friends, gaze at otherwise ordinary looking girls dressed up in their bests (of course, expecting the same from their side) and finally come back.
But this is much more than that or else the description of a typical marriage is over by now. It is about a free, happy independent man who would now not what he used to be. He is very few of my friends who would not touch alcohol, stay away from smoking and yet is a person with whom I can spend great time without getting drunk myself. This I am writing while I am just back from his (ladies may ignore or may use a ‘their’ here) marital funeral. May be I have used too much of pessimism in description of events but this is actually what everybody was talking about; “bechara acchaa ladka tha; has le beta tera last time hai” etc etc.
What I am feeling now is a strange kind of feeling and despite a futile attempt at this year’s CAT my vocabulary skills don’t suggest me a suitable adjective for this state of mind.
He is a person with whom I have enjoyed more than 2 years in college and we still feel like telling everything to each other. Alas! Now this statement would be used in past tense. For the past 2 years after he left college, we have always been in touch, and would talk on phone for hours discussing both trivial and serious matters. Though we had a rough patch while he was in final year but the real strength and resilience of our friendship stood the test of bad times and today I was in his marriage as a ‘ghar ka banda’ as I was instructed explicitly not to get drunk and control others!
You imagine a fantabulous dancer dancing to the tunes of his wife’s numbers. You hear from a carefree man words about planning a job, a home, life and what not! Though there had been some significant factors in the background but still the foreground matters. In addition to a great man transformed to a diametrically opposite being, there is another thought lightening through my mind.
Gaju’s marriage has sparked the beginning of nuptial nightmares for his batch-mates and this suggests that we are all there in the pipeline; sooner or later we all are going to be executed. There is no escape; the marital guillotine is not that far away now! We all will leave the world of happiness, freedom and bacchanals to the settled life of self control and being remote control, a doomed hell of abstinence, wife, kids…
May be that wont be as bad as I m trying to portray it but there will be a breed of people with whom you wont be able to share the same warmth as you do today. And that breed is friends!
In Gaju’s wedding I met Vandana, Gaju’s batchmate, who came with her fiancé. Though she has always wanted me to quit but earlier we used to talk a lot and I think she enjoyed me narrating my ‘spirit-ual’ adventures. But today, I don’t know why she turned me off when I had just started. I couldn’t understand the reason but the presence of another soul in absolute vicinity had definitely made an impact. She is no longer the same!
So the moral of the whole story is that basically and acidically, both ways, life moves on! You have to go the way life takes you and it suggests that you’ll then see your friends on yearly or decadal basis. Thus the moral of the story is, “ The clock is ticking away…stop reading it and have fun with your friends”
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