Sunday Story: Single, Not Going to Mingle

It was an unusually quiet morning at Kritika’s home. It was almost quarter to noon, but the household still seemed to be in a sort of slumber. Kritika, for whom it was difficult to stay silent for more than five minutes at a stretch, had hardly spoken more than five words together since morning. And it did not seem like the situation would improve anytime soon.

As silent as the morning had been, the previous night had been equally tempestuous, if not more, and for all the valid reasons as far as an Indian household is concerned. The evening had started quite normally with the family getting together for dinner. But, regrettably, the seemingly casual conversation ventured into a forbidden zone from where coming back alive was impossible—Kritika’s marital status.

Ever since Kritika had turned twenty-five, marriage had become a commonplace topic in Kritika’s home like national politics. In the beginning, when it was still bearable, her mother would just casually bring it up every once while, reminding Kritika that she had entered the golden period for marriage and should therefore start taking it seriously.

Kritika would nonchalantly listen to her and equally nonchalantly get back to whatever she had been doing. But as months passed, and Kritika turned twenty-six, the frequency increased from every once in a while to twice or thrice every month—and it kept increasing at an ever-increasing rate. It reached a point where not a day went by without Kritika’s mother reminding her of the time she was “wasting away” and how she would regret it once she turned thirty.

It began with Kritika’s mother coaxing her into creating a profile on a matrimonial site so that she could just browse through the profiles passively. Once Kritika gave in to this request, newer requests kept coming in—see this profile here, meet this guy there, and whatnot. But she did her best to keep her cool, until the previous night.

The previous night, the dinner table conversation started like any other—Kritika’s father asking how her day had been, the friendly banter and bickering with Kaushal, her younger brother, and her grandmother force-feeding her because she had been neglecting her health and beauty by giving more importance to her work over everything else. Kritika’s mother found the perfect opportunity in between her grandmother’s ongoing lecture to give her own.

She started off with her usual concern regarding how careless Kritika was being and how it was going to cost her. The very next moment, her grandmother chimed in by saying that Kritika was being quite selfish and irresponsible by dedicating all her time to her work and neglecting her “duties” as a grown-up woman. And that was the moment of the undoing of Kritika’s patience.

All this while, Kritika had been quiet, patiently listening to everything that was being said, but that one sentence from her grandmother finally pushed her over the edge. And when she finally spoke, the entire room fell silent—Kritika announced her decision to stay unmarried forever. With that, she stormed out of the room before anybody else could respond. And ever since, the entire household had been quieter than usual for the rest of the night and almost half of the following day.

Kritika barely came out of her room for most of the day, and this worried her mother a lot—she had never seen her daughter act this way before. She finally decided to check on her later in the evening. Upon entering, she found Kritika sitting by the window. She walked up to her, placed her hands on her shoulders, and apologised to her. And then, she left.

For a moment, Kritika was stunned. She had expected all kinds of rebukes of all the varied intensities she could think of, but an apology was the last thing she had anticipated. It may not have been much, but it was enough to show that no matter how diverging their thought processes or ideologies were, for her mother, Kritika was above everything else. This one gesture restored in Kritika the hope she had long given up on.

Liked this story? Here’s another to get you thinking—More Than Meets the Eye