Love Beyond Comfort

 

These days I am going through a romantic phase in my reading list. The trials and tribulations of the aggressive, feminist, docile, downtrodden, rich, or poor heroines as the case may be, is keeping me enthralled. I know you must be thinking that I am too old for romance but here I am old and romantic in this bitter war filled world psyche. A world where marriage seems to be on the way out (it has been like that for decades now; but I suppose, slow and steady wins the race!)

Of course, google keeps track of my interest and so I am bombarded on all fronts (specially on Instagram) by reels which are romantic. I have these eye candy English heroes who read love poetry, romantic letters, and dialogues in their baritone voices. I also have young couple who have just got into a relationship, just got married or are in the process of enlarging their family (some of them have four children already!) I do wonder how it would feel to have your whole day filmed and put up for public consumption. There is one young lady who is having her fourth child, she is in throes of labour but is being made up for a pre-birth photo shoot!

What Google insists on filling up my feeds is inter racial couples (I must have clicked on one of them sometime!) So, I have interesting couples- ‘Indian-Italian,’ ‘Indian-European,’ ‘Korean-Indian,’ ‘Chinese-Indian,’ ‘German-Jew,’ ‘French-American’… the list is endless. But let me assure you it is educative and interesting. I not only learn about all the different cultural differences, but I also learn about their commonalities.

I recently heard from a young man (not directly but via a conversation) that we should stick to our own culture while getting married. His argument was that if you love a girl who does not belong to your community you should not go ahead in the relationship. It is eminently possible to find the same qualities in a girl of your own community. Do you really love someone for their qualities?

According to him this and only this is a win-win situation. The reasons he gave forth was interesting- you do not have to change your faith, this in turn will lead you to be comfortable in your relationship, this in turn will lead to less confrontation and this will lead to an ease of co-existence.

I was so disappointed! Is marriage or having a relationship all about co-existence? Is love all about being comfortable? Granted I am not very experienced in such matters, but I know all about romance (theoretically!) Romance is not for the faint hearted. It is all about going against the grain. It is, I believe, “live and let live.” Wouldn’t a relationship be boring if each of the partners agreed with the other. Whether it was their faith or their behaviour in question.

There is a very uncomfortable trend that I am noticing these days where couples who have been married for more than twenty five to thirty years are going in for divorce. As one of them said, “There was nothing more in our relationship, we had squeezed it dry. The excitement was missing and so we decided to live our own lives.” There is nothing wrong or right in this but throwing away a bond where you have invested so many resources (emotion, time, feelings, and passion) seems pointless.

Going back “to be comfortable” I realise that if there is no discomfort there is no growth. If the Neanderthals had not interbred with Homo sapiens sixty thousand years ago, we would not be the intelligent and exciting race we have become. As far as I am aware, medical advisory about marriage is, we should not marry into the same genetic pool as some of our negative traits get amplified. In India we are not supposed to marry into the same “gotra” (system of identifying one’s patrilineal ancestry, tracing descent back to a common ancient Rishi. It serves as a lineage marker for, marriage, and rituals, where individuals with the same gotra are considered siblings and generally prohibited from intermarrying)

I thus appreciate the inter cultural relationships. They not only expand our horizon, but they also enlarge our gene pools (in case of offspring). They make the world anti-insular, humans more broad minded. The racist mind set is in danger of becoming extinct and the world will move slowly towards peace but not boring peace. A peace hopefully filled with the right amount of discord and pain to enhance growth spurts.

In the end, perhaps love is neither about comfort nor constant upheaval, but about the willingness to be changed. To choose another person not because they mirror us perfectly, but because they expand us, sometimes gently, sometimes painfully. A relationship that demands nothing eventually offers nothing; one that challenges us, unsettles us, and yet holds us, is the one that leaves a lasting imprint.

To love across differences of culture, belief, or temperament is not the easier path, but it is often the more enriching one. It resists insularity, questions inherited boundaries, and keeps alive the possibility that human connection can evolve beyond what we have been taught to accept.

If there is to be peace, let it not be the quiet of sameness, but the vibrant, imperfect harmony of differences that have learned not just to coexist, but to grow together.

 

 

 

 

 

The Perfect Half-Boiled Egg

 

For all my growing-up years, breakfast meant the same three things: bread, eggs, and milk. It was non-negotiable. An egg each morning was a ritual my father followed unfailingly, and continues to follow even now, nearing ninety.

I, however, never shared his enthusiasm. Poached eggs were far too gooey. Omelettes were worse, filled with offensively large chunks of onion. My mother, determined to get some protein into me, settled on the only remaining option: the boiled egg. I ate it with deep reluctance, so much so that if she was distracted, I would quietly slip it into the dustbin.

Years later, after raising two children and a husband (who comes from an egg-loving family) I have made my peace with eggs. Not entirely, but enough. Poached eggs remain a firm no. But scrambled eggs, cooked my way, vegetables chopped into near invisibility, fried until crisp, with a dash of soy, are something I genuinely enjoy. Omelettes are acceptable too, provided nothing inside them announces its presence. And boiled eggs? They are my fallback when I don’t feel like cooking.

My father, on the other hand, comes from a generation where men stayed out of the kitchen. Their culinary authority came not from experience, but from comparison, “My mother made it best.” But he always liked to think of himself as different. Naturally talkative, he gathered recipes and techniques from anyone willing to share, storing them carefully and building elaborate theories around them.

Over the years, he has explained to us (often in great detail) how easy it is to make rasgullas, how simple it is to make cottage cheese, how perfectly one can prepare sugar syrup. During his time in Malaysia, living with housemates after retirement, he even claimed to have made parathas from scratch. His repertoire is vast: roast chicken, baingan bharta, fish roasted over a campfire you’ve caught yourself. As children, we believed him unquestioningly. As adults, we began to understand that his knowledge is impeccable, but entirely theoretical. I realized that he is a theoretical physicist! The ingredients are right but following the method is dicey.

These days, life has slowed him down. A fractured leg, age, fading hearing; all have made him dependent in ways he never was before. He lives with my sister, who ensures he gets enough protein through the day. The highlight of his evening is still his egg.

But not just any egg.

For years, his breakfast egg was fried just so, the white crisp, the yolk soft and gelatinous. Hard-boiled eggs, therefore, are unacceptable. What he wants is a perfectly half-boiled egg.

Since he can no longer make it himself, he instructs the cook.

“The water must be boiling before you put the egg in.”

She nods, already thinking about how much milk she can spare for her tea.

“Boil it for exactly seven minutes.”

Another nod. Whether she owns a watch is doubtful, though she does have a mobile phone.

“Then take it out, put it in cold water, peel it, and bring it with salt and pepper.”

By now, she has left the room.

In the kitchen, she fills a pan with water, drops the egg in before it even warms up, and lets it boil for as long as it takes her to prepare her tea. The result is inevitable: a hard, grey, overcooked egg.

My father is disappointed. The yolk is no longer soft, it is solid, lifeless. He repeats his instructions the next day, and the day after that. Sometimes the cook changes, and the process begins again. But so far, the perfect half-boiled egg has remained elusive.

It must be frustrating that the person you are instructing lets all the sound bytes slip in and out of her ears without retaining even a miniscule amount of it. But the as we grow older and infirm we do get dependent on someone for something. It is less frustrating if we were to accept the imperfect world and its imperfect activities rather than whipping ourselves to try and reach a perfect destination

Perhaps the perfect egg is no longer the point.

Perhaps, in the end, it is about accepting the imperfect ones—the overboiled, unyielding eggs of an imperfect world—and learning, gently, to live with them.