Meet the De-sarkars (my in-laws)

In my last post I had written about the arrival of my in-laws to Bangalore first time after marriage; now I would like to share the eventful week I spent with them. Actually being a love marriage I hardly got time to know my in-laws closely as (luckily) we (me & my wife) didn’t have the convincing part to be done before marriage; both our parents were cool about the idea and they literary rushed through the marriage as if they wanted to get it done before they could live peacefully ever after.

So on all the occasions (read three) that I met my in-laws it was in a very formal environment where you are surrounded by relatives who are placed strategically as per their relation ship status (close relative, distant relative etc etc) and one is so conscious about the strange looks the either side give you that you actually forget or fail to notice minute things about your would be in-laws. So this was the only opportunity that I was getting to spend “quality” time with them and couldn’t help but notice the behavioral patterns.

So let’s meet the de-sarkars:-

The day starts early for de-sarkars as they are up at 5.00 am; a tad too early for the lazy bum that Iam who still believes that it’s the sun which should be allowed to rise first and not the humans and by rising before the sun you commit a violation of the rules of nature, however I have no ill feelings about people who commit this violation as long as they don’t disturb or try to recruit me into their gang. But for de-sarkars every awake second is a celebration* (not the one which Mr. Vijay Mallya makes) and the first among the group to get up puts on the television at the highest decibel level your poor ears could handle. So your’s truly who was once used to wake up hearing Pink Floyd strumming “shine on you crazy diamond” now is shaken awake by a few hundred kemon achhos and bhalo acchis belted out by heavily made up women on nondescript channels. Iam sure I have noticed my television say “its gonna be a long and Bengali day Rahul” I mean think about my poor television guys, I run out of my home at 8.30 for work and I go back at 8.30 pm but the poor guy cant even protest he belts out serial after serial in Bengali right from 5.15 am to 1.00 am, I wouldn’t be shocked if the next time he greets me in Bengali rather than the customary English and occasional Hindi. Its been 10 days since I saw Arnab Goswami and I kind of miss him, my poor television so used to discovery, national geographic, MTV and Times now has had to make friends with zee bangla, star jholsha* (its jalsa but is pronounced jholsha, so I thought I would as well change the spelling) Sony aanth and a few more which are too miniscule to even mention.

I usually don’t get an opportunity much on weekdays it’s the weekends which suddenly have become longer, lets experience the weekend that I spend with them:-





Breakfast:-

The breakfast hour is at 11.00 am and in between anything and everything related to food is greeted with a loud cheering and some compliments. The entire clan gets together for breakfast and some how has to speak on the top of their voices while the food is still in their mouths which makes me concentrate hard to avoid any stray food flying off their mouth than to eat my breakfast. I was brought up with a lot of stress on table manners and this certainly is off my limits. However post breakfast is when the clan automatically divides itself into two groups:-

(1) Watch Television
(2) Watch a movie on the computer
Both the groups have a couple of scores to settle with each other as they try to outdo each other by increasing their volumes it went to crazy levels till the Einstein in me prompted the importance of the invention of head phones to the group watching a movies which was again not a very good advice since headphones are not designed to be used by two curious people (read:-de-sarkars) at the same time.

The communication between the group is robust and loud enough for my security guard to understand four floors below despite the distance between the groups being only 10 meters; My neighbors Iam sure can recall most of the conversations if asked to, In the midst of this mayhem one of the clan members can break into an impromptu song sequence which sounds familiar to non-Bengali ears and then you are reminded that the great large jewellery wearing Bappi da lives in Bengal and would have copied all the Hindi tunes. While watching television with the de-sarkars I could suddenly see the women folk go up in air with joy and the man of the family giving jealous smile which I realized a bit later was to the man on the screen heartthrob of millions of Bengali girls “proshonjeet”* (*actually prasanjeet pronounced proshonjeet) had made his appearance dressed in colours which would put our Govinda to shame dancing on the road on a popular bangla gaan.

Lunch:-

Lunch is at 4.00. I stared helplessly at the five different mini mountains of vegetables and fishes at my plate. The great bangla food festival had started while the clan decided to cheer every spoonful that was added to their plates I quietly said hello to five kinds of pumpkins, three kinds of fish and a daal soup (which I was later told was actually the daal) the entire clan dissected the fish to its mere bones while I was still getting introduced to the mixed vegetable and luchis (puris) If ever I have felt that regional discrimination exists its only when I got the looks from the clan on my inability to eat fish; I scrapped through the lunch for which I was to be reprimanded by my wife later for not appreciating my mom-in-law’s cooking (a non-pardonable sin I must add).

After the lunch the entire clan decides to take an afternoon nap (the quietest 2 hours in my house) after which the clan is back together doing what they are best at singing, dancing and talking to each other in the loudest possible voice.

Dinner:-

Dinner was at 12.30 am and all the characters which played on my plate had decided to change costumes and re-appear it was like watching a bad play with a low budget play group where same set of actors appear and re-appear in different roles to save on the cost of having more actors. After which I was subjected to the customary after dinner “gulpo” (family talk where u discuss all useless things) and the subject of discussion was the summary of all the serials and movies watched during the day and the critical feedback (read rape) on everything right from the women’s make-up to the dialogue delivery and the camera angles used. Art & Movies runs in the Bengali blood and you better not mess with it, so before sleep could engulf me into the waiting Sunday my sister-in-law broke into a Lata Mangeshkar Hindi number in Bengali accent which asks the boatman to flow with the flow of the river; not sure about the boatman in Bangalore but my sleep did take the song seriously and flew away from me and I ended up staring at the ceiling waiting for the weekend to get over….