Blogger is back!

Five months down the line.

No blogging, hardly any facebooking, no partying, no time. And I’m only 5 months into marriage!

I’ve reopened this blog after many, many months and it’s only because I was so short of time. First of all, for all of you getting married sometime in the future, here’s a piece of advice – it’s a BAD idea to do it the traditional way with your families getting involved in the planning. You can’t imagine the 500 different interpretations of how a marriage has to performed! And we are toh both Bengalis! Your mom has one opinion on what rituals to perform and how to perform them, your dad has one more opinion, your grandparents have one too, your other relatives have some ideas, your man’s parents have other ideas, and in the middle of all this, the two of you end up fighting, finally realizing that you’re bickering on behalf of other people!

Solution – let your parents handle it. Completely. Don’t ask for anything and you won’t be let down!

Then comes the wedding day and you stay hungry all day. More rituals. You search for your phone. You log on to your FB app. You try to while away ur time while the pandit goes on and on.

The night we got married, we had what is called “bashor ghor” which means all your friends/ cousins stay the night with you and keep you awake, ensuring you don’t “do dirty stuff” that night. See the scene is that you are not supposed to sleep together all by yourselves until the “boubhaat” happens (the boubhaat is the occasion when the girl reaches the guy’s house – Calcutta in my case – and goes through with the reception there). Now ideally, the boubhaat happens one or two days later, but in our case it happened 5 nights later (5 very long nights)!

So at 7 am the next morning, we had only caught 1 hour of sleep (there was partying and loud music till 6!) and the bidai (vidai) began. One more ritual. Sigh. And to go where? To his place (Bombay house) to get “welcomed” by his mother, have lunch and go to the hotel to get ready for the Bombay reception. We finally caught some sleep only after the reception and I don’t know how I went through with the whole thing. No sleep, no sleeping together. What the hell.

In Calcutta, our 6 day trip was full of family lunches, dinners, Calcutta reception, more lunches, more dinners and shit loads of tea all day long. All in all, all the wedding events just drained all the energy out of us.

My point was going to be – before I started this rant – get married in the family court. Seriously.

Finally, the honeymoon was a pleasant break from it all. Egypt and Morocco. For all you leisure travelers, Morocco is one place you really shouldn’t miss. Vegetarians can skip.

And then we came back to 3 days of me moving in – packing, unpacking, making space at his (now our) house, keeping everything in place, selecting stuff to throw (his, not mine of course hehe).

Three days later, I was back at work. And then there was work, traveling (oh how I hate Goregaon from the bottom of my heart), making time for parents, making time for friends and being able to spend some teeny weeny bit of time with the husband!

I know some people handle this better than me, but I just couldn’t juggle all this together. So I started shaving off time from facebook, blogging, partying. And I think I am just about getting the hang of it 5 months later.

And now that I am getting comfortable with this, it’s time I blogged, with good things on my mind! Life is great, just the two of us. I don’t miss my parents’ kach-kach on how messy my room is :) And I am never disturbed while I’m sleeping, with questions on what I want to have for lunch. And when I miss my parents, they’re just 4 local stations away to meet! I'm always welcomed at my parents’ place with a glass of whiskey now :) How cool is that, eh? Sometimes I miss the cat, and even though the hubby is not an animal person, I'm slowly gonna get the cat into the house (it’s a long drawn process, but I'm confident that it’ll work) from time to time.

And you know the awesomest thing? We can stay out as long as we want, without having to reply to my father’s SMSes on when I'm coming back! It’s a different thing that I feel sleepy at 11:30 pm these days which means that I'm dropping dead half way thru a dinner and whispering “Let’s go home now” into the husband’s ear hehehe!

So anyway, now that I have written to my heart’s content for the day, the blog is now open again!

Weekend at Delhi and Chandigarh

Last week, I was off to Chandigarh for my friend, Garima's wedding on 7th. It was very do-able since it was on a Sunday and it would be a good weekend trip for me. On Friday, I took the August Kranti train to Nizamuddin (near Delhi) on which, unfortunately, my ticket was not confirmed. Since I have never travelled RAC, I was very confused on the language on my PNR status online. It said my seat was on coach RA4, which made me think RA4 was an actual coach number. But my ignorance was soon cleared after some googling. RA4 meant I had an RAC seat in coach A4. Ouch.

So I went to the station early to speak to the TTE and see if anything could be arranged to get me a confirmed ticket. Nope, he said. The train was full. So I travelled RAC. I had to share my berth with some guy. But time passed well coz we were 4 RAC people on 2 berths and we talked for some time until it got late and was time to sleep. I couldn't sleep with the guy so I arranged to sleep with a little girl named Muskaan. She was traveling with her father and he was kind enough to let me share sleeping space with her.

At 11:00 am, Saturday, at Nizamuddin station, my cousin Monica had sent a driver to pick me up. She's always doing these ultra nice things for me which i totally protest but she never listens. So I went to her place at Gurgaon and spent the rest of the morning and afternoon with my neices, Bhuvi and Diva, and Bhuvi's friends. Bhuvi just had her 11th birthday and was treating her friends on Saturday, and her mom, dad and little sis were gonna be chaperones. So I joined in to be with Monica.


The party was a lot of chitter chatter, which is obvious when you have so many 11 year olds. We went to Pizza Hut where we had a reservation. After half an hour of sitting there, only half the soups had arrived and Sandeep (Monica's husband) was steaming mad. We left Pizza hut as the garlic bread just made its way to our table. But we left and went to McDonalds instead. All the kids were so thrilled by this! And thanks to them, I tried the "shake the fires" thingy which is btw not better than regular fries.

So all this done, I sat and chatted with Monica, sandeep and his parents for an hour or so and then decided to finally leave. Monica had made the cab wait for me so I got a ride to Vasant Vihar where my other cousin Joy lives. I spent the night with them, and discovered that Joy's dad was a really good singer and is interested in learning to play music after he retires.


The next morning, I took a bus to Chandigarh from ISBT (or the bus adda in hindi). I did not take a Volvo, because I don't crave for comfort, and the semi-deluxe buses have reclining seats and all, except no AC. Which you don't need in winter up north anyways. Plus, the volvo's only leave every 2-3 hours whereas the semi-deluxe buses leave every half an hour and cost only Rs. 150. The bus usually takes 5 hours (+/- an hour) and I reached in 4.5 hours which was great. At 5:00, I was at Garima's house.


Garima wasn't home coz she was at the parlour, but she came back and obliged to pose for a typical garima picture.

The wedding began at 7:00 pm with the baraat and dinner first and the actual marriage ceremony started only at 12 am. In between the ceremony, the bride, groom and pandit are allowed 5 minutes breaks. Which is a good thing because by 4, it was still not over. Thats when I got really tired and took off to a glass room nearby, laid myself on the couch and slept with my shawl over me. I eventually woke up when the marriage was done and all I wanted to do was to sleep.

We left for Garima's place and then I realised that there was no place really for me to sleep in. I could've squeezed in with osme ppl, except that I didn't know them! So when I saw Garima sleeping in a single bed all by herself, i pushed her to one corner (and she didn't even realise this, and slept next to her. So technically, she spent suhaag raat with me! lol. She was supposed to leave for Nitin's house in the morning for the vidaai and I didn't even realise when she left coz I was fast asleep.

The next morning I had to wake up and take a bus to Delhi, but one of Garima's uncles was also leaving for there in his car and so I got a ride. By 5 pm, I was in Delhi and I had a 8 pm flight to catch. I whiled away my time at the airport and finally the flight left at 9:50 pm. It was so irritating coz I was supposed to reach Bombay at 10 but reached only by 12. Ughh.

Anyway, after that, I met Kashif who was really nice (and angry) to wait for me coz I wanted to have dinner with him that night (I thought I would reach Bombay by 10:30 max!). We went to Mirador, which is a good hotel with a reaaaally cheap coffee shop. It serves food at the prices of normal restaurants....not like the hotels charge. After going through some photographs and stories of the trip with Kashif, he dropped me home and I went off to sleep, to get up in time the next day for another day of regular life.