One year.

I am a wife. I love saying it out loud. I can’t get enough of it.

 We get married hoping that our marriage is going to be as perfect as our wedding day. Perfect morning kisses, deep conversations, loving the same television shows and laughing on cue, holding hands while strolling in the garden with a home filled with potted plants, cushions with just the right amount “cush”, sprawling windows that romance sunshine.  My version of marriage wasn’t so skewed. I don’t expect things to be perfect all the time.

Whoever said marriage is hard work wasn't joking.  Suddenly two different people share a life, a bed, and well luckily not in my case, a bathroom. You’re not born family, but you become family. You scream, cry, love, nurse hangovers, laugh, and bitch together. And at each other.

Your problems become his problems and his become yours. You can’t make decisions on your own because now your decisions affect two people. Me, myself and I is now me, my husband and us.

My husband is married to a drama queen. And I am married to a teenage boy. I mother him, he revolts. He says something in jest; I take it personally and banish him from our bedroom. He plays loud music as I try to read. He tries to lie, I play detective.

Yes, it’s really not easy.  But while we are caught up in compromise, constant changes and trivial fights about whether we spend more time with his friends or mine, we start to understand each other better. And I fall in love a little more each day. I love our inside jokes. I love that we can understand each other in between mouthfuls of toothpaste. I love that we sometimes dance for each other at random times of the day. I love that he can feel my moods change. I love that I can burp after eating a kathi kabab stuffed with raw onions. I love that I can lie next to him in my glasses and hair dripping with sarso ka tel and he’ll still kiss me. I love that we talk to each other like bros.  I love that we plan holidays we can’t afford. I love that around him I am me.

I realize that no matter how much sunshine pours through windows or how cushy your cushions are, there is no such thing as a perfect home. The perfect home is made up of two imperfect people that learn to love each other no matter what. In sickness, in health, or bad hair days.

So I have my moments of insecurity, anger and doubt and I go to bed angry, snarl and mutter under my breath. But then….. someone farts and we explode with laughter. And just like that, we aren’t angry anymore. I am instantly reminded of how lucky I am to be next to the man I love. Sometimes it takes a fart to bring you back to reality. Trust me, it works.

Maqsood

There is something really upsetting about the Delhi Zoo incident.
Besides the obvious of course. I am not a fan of the human species, I choose animals any day. But the Delhi Zoo incident opened my eyes to the desensitized beings our generation has evolved or rather regressed into. Today we can watch a man plead for his life and then die and react by sharing it with a click of an emotionless button. I am guilty of watching it, too. But what I am not guilty of are nasty, inhuman comments. He deserved it. F*cking retard. Drunk fool. Poor tiger is not to blame. The only comment I agree with is the last but then a man did die, a horrific, sad death.
As I watched the nasty remarks flow in, I wondered if we would have reacted the same way if it wasn’t Maqsood but some rich kid from Delhi? Would we have just called him retarded or stoned and simply passed on the video? Don’t we all do stupid things and have friends who have done stupid things? Do we wish death on them?

We have heard many versions of this story. Some state that he was drunk, some state that he jumped in, some claim that he threw stones at the tiger, lost his balance and fell. We probably will never know the truth. But if we can watch how his life came to an end, perhaps we can shed a little light on his life itself.

His name was Maqsood and had a very short attention span. He used his phone to listen to music because he never had any money to top it up. He had a wife and a child on the way. His parents were separated. He lost recently lost his job and was obsessed with tigers and even had photographs of them on his phone. He would visit the zoo frequently since he lost his job and then narrate stories about the tigers to his friends. He was 22 years old.

So as we sit on our cushioned behinds and comment on a death of a silly man and ‘like’ a picture of a couple honeymooning in Italy in the same breath, parents have lost a son. A wife has lost a husband. Her unborn child, a father.

And we watched, made jokes, and called him an asshole.