Simply Me

With the 100 days between our engagement and wedding, I tried to find out love stories about some of our near and dear ones... While in a love-cum-arranged marriage, the questions are... Who proposed, how did he/she propose and so on, in an arranged marriage, the love part of it generally happens after the engagement and the the period between the engagement and the wedding is a time when the guy and girl try their best to meet each other or find some way or the other of communicating to each other...

With amma and annu, the engagement lasted a 100 days as well... At a time when meeting each other was close to impossible and no internet (yeah yeah, the dark ages) and amma in Mangalore and annu in Pune (this distance takes 15 hours by bus in this year and date, so meeting was definitely not a possibility), they exchanged daily letters or cards... The cards were pretty and sweet, amma tells me (like she would show me any of those) and she has preserved them, she says.

When I was talking to Geetakka and Ganesh maam on the phone, both of them on different extensions at their house, I told them about annu and amma exchanging letters. Ganesh maam tells me, they had done the same during their engagement period, but, with a difference... Suddenly, I could hear giggling on Geetakka's end of the phone. They were both in different cities. Ganesh maamu had been working with a bank and while they exchanged daily letters, with the year end at the bank, maamu was more than a little bogged down with the amount of work... After being unable to write for a week, Ganesh maamu was surprised by a letter from his fiance's father one day... Of course, the surprise was nothing compared to the shock at the wordings in the letter... Ajju had written a severe reprimand to him asking him why he hadn't written to Geetakka for so many days... Ajju's poor daughter was in tears at not having received any letter, worried to death about Ganeshmaamu's health... Needless to say, Ganeshmaamu was quick to reply to the letter and write without fail since...

These topics of course led to our conversation on the dining table yesterday where Vasanth mhanthu and Vidya mhava looked at each other with smiles on their faces. Mhanthu was then posted in Delhi and mhava was in Cochin... With the 3 hour wait for placing trunk calls, they were quite lucky that STD calls were being introduced on a trial basis to and from Delhi to different cities of India... Needless to say, mhave's father was quite annoyed with the telephone bills but the fact of the matter was mhanthu and mhava were definitely not bothered by that... Mhanthu then quietly said, he'd send mhava gifts as and when possible.. One was a red saree... with which he sent a letter; but he was definitely in a quandary when he decided to send her a red VIP bag... what does he write now? He expanded the letters VIP for her.... What he said... Lets see who can find out...

Vatsalakka and Shinnamaam's wedding was a little different... Vatsalakka's parents informed her that she was going to get married to Shinnamaam a week hence. So the first time they met was at the wedding!!!

Rekha mavshi and Manali mavshi had been laughing when we asked them. Manali mavshi and Deepak kaka were both in Mumbai and they would meet as often as possible at the station. Her boss was used to losing his secretary at lunch time... Rekha mavshi on the other hand... Kaka had some work in the same town and had been staying in the same house as Rekha mavshi with her family... so much so that people actually thought he was one of the dozen kids of the house. While this had the advantage of there being not the heartache of not seeing each other, the obvious problem was he had gotten to know all her tantrums.

Luckily for R and me, we had the best of all communication media... phone calls, SMS, skype and between the time we first met and our wedding, he came to visit me about 4 times in Pune - once being a surprise visit for my birthday :)

While I started this post before the wedding, the engagement is now over and I now get to see my hubby, Raghavendra, daily... life is definitely sweet :)

Labels: Pyar hua chupake se, Yaadein reh jaati hain...