Arranged Marriage Blues 4 - Arranged Travel

-Akshay Ranganath

There comes a time in your pre-marriage, post-engagement time when you need to travel to some place for some family reason and you are supposed to take your fiance with you. Its one of those travels which you, as an engaged guy dreams of – so that you can spend a lot of time with your 'would be' and which all the parents conspire to make it as uninteresting as possible.

So what happens is this: There will be a family occasion for which you all need to go together, be it a visit to the 'family-God' or some such occasion. For this you and your fiance talk and plan – concoct on plans, hatch plots and develop a blueprint of the ultimate travel. General this journey would be early in the morning and would last about 2 to 3 hours in a (generally) public transport.

Parents will always get a whiff of such plots and come up with a sinister plan of inviting lots of the aunts, cousins and other pesky creatures whose sole purpose of existence is to ensure that you and your fiancé don't get to be together. So you undertake a travel in a mini-Universe called the public transport with the whole mass being split between the romantic-”Us” versus the unromantic “them”.

One simple way to escape the pesky creatures of intrusion is to do this. You be courteous and let the elders and the younger ones all climb in and settle down. Assuming they're not way too much in number, they'll all sediment to the initial part of the bus, leaving the back seats vacant. So, you take the back seat. If the pesky creatures are intelligent (and generally they are!) they'll spread themselves around leaving no place that is private for you. In which case, you are better off sitting on the roof of the bus! And God alone can save you.

Anyway, returning back to the trip, what you do is to let the relatives get in. Then, you go in with your fiancé. Here, you need to be extra careful. The wily relatives will offer seats. They'll say they've caught this nice cosy seat for you – it will generally be a three seater with the most nosiest aunt in the middle. I'd leave it to your intelligence on what you do next.

The ideal seat to choose, if available is the one before the last one. This way you are far enough from everyone as possible with as much comfort as possible. It also means that the bus will jump a lot more – and if God hath mercy, your fiance will bump into you once in a while. And that would be like heaven.

You can pray for a maniacal driver. In this case, he'd drive round the turns like he was some F1 driver and that would mean some more controlling touches – and maybe you can even hold your fiancé's hand! But, don't overdo it. It all needs to be romantic, despite the relatives passing you all the chips, bananas, jack fruit, gvuavas and the college crown on back seat. Oh yeah, also the distraction from the latest David Dhavan flick that would most proabably balring from the TV.

In the intermediate time between clinging to seat for life and the eating, you open up your heart and enjoy the ride of your life. This my friends is the concept of the “Arranged Travel”. Happy journey!