She doesn’t hate it when I’m funny. She likes my jokes, even the silly ones—especially the silly ones. People often underestimate the significance of a partner who effortlessly finds joy in your humour.
She continues, ‘Now our mail ID will be full of Daksh!You’re so cute! messages from women with unhelpful husbands.’
‘Look who’s talking,’ I respond. ‘You have the most number of marriage proposals per mail. You can choose to be married to a thousand men at the same time.’
‘A legitimate nightmare,’ she says with a chuckle.
We have narrowed down the profile of the kind of man who writes Amruta a glowing e-mail. A mid-forties, divorced (occasionally widowed), polished man, mostly consultants, plenty of smartly managed investments, father of at least one kid, a wife who’s no longer in the picture, a slight paunch, a little entitlement, and a desperation that’s hard to hide despite the corporate speak in the mail.
All of them want to have a ‘conversation’ with Amruta and ‘see where it takes them’. Men update their vocabulary, but they still remain boys.
I can’t entirely blame them.
Amruta has a deep, husky voice and sounds like someone in her early forties, or at least in her mid-thirties. Despite her reminding everyone that she had her kids early, at eighteen no less, everyone tends to forget she’s only twenty-six. Sometimes, even I forget she’s only twenty-six. She doesn’t look a day over nineteen. That she’s 5’1” and has a round face makes her look even younger.
Sometimes I, too, forget I’m twenty-five.
Butwe feel oldwhen we look at others our age. People our age are still doubled over in front of clubs vomiting their guts out while we are ironing the kids’ uniforms and cutting sandwiches into little cubes, hoping they will eat.
Amruta and I did a two-part podcast about ‘The FOMO of Young Parents’and came to the very obvious conclusion that we want to do everything: be present with the kids but also attend hazy, face-melting parties, read books with the kids but also go on long drives with no end dates, stay at home but also go on impromptu jaunts, go on solo vacations but also on family trips, watch a kids’ movie but also actively discuss the frequent break-up of people around us. It’s because of these fairly obvious, unintelligent pieces of advice that we caution our listeners not to take us seriously.
‘You’re getting the mathematics homework done today, okay?’ Amruta warns me the third time in the past few hours.
‘I... fine,’ I mumble. ‘I... just can’t believe that they are still struggling with subtraction. How can someone—’
‘Don’t shame our kids,’ she cuts me with a laugh. ‘But I agree it’s amazing how bad they are.’
It’s unbelievable how bad Rabbani, nine, and Amruta’s sons, Naman and Nishant, eight, are at mathematics. We like to tell ourselves that by the time they grow up, AI will make mathematics-related jobs obsolete and it’s not going to matter. Every couple of months during the parents-teachers meeting,Amruta and I spend twenty humiliating minutes in front of the worried class teacher of 3B, Bal Bharati School, listening to her tell us how badly Rabbani, Naman and Nishant are doing in maths. Other parents have said they heard that the same concerned class teacher who looks over us now whispers animatedly in the staffroom, speculating about whether something is going on between Amruta and me.
The class teacher’s right.
There’s something between Amruta and me. We just don’t know what it is, or what to call it. Our lives fit in like a complex jigsaw puzzle, a tall Jenga tower. Rabbani and her sons are in the same class, we both live in Gurgaon, we both have flexible day jobs, this tiny podcast and a mid-twenties life that’s not shared by a lot.
And we are both scared.
If we fit in the last piece of the puzzle—get together, label it—and get our lives intertwined, we would be making a decision for too many people. Her parents, my father and the kids. And that scares the living daylights out of us.
My phone rings.
‘Hello . . . what . . . nonsense . . . you serious? . . . no way . . . I will see what I can do . . .’
I cut the call. Instinctively, I open up MakeMyTrip and check the next flight to Dubai. It leaves in two hours.
‘Is everything okay?’ asks Amruta.
‘Indigo forgot to load Gaurav’s luggage,’ I answer. ‘The next Indigo flight is in the night. If the clothes need to get there then, wait, there’s an Air India in a couple of hours—’
She cuts me before I can finish. ‘I’m not teaching the kids, absolutely not!’ she protests.
I’m already getting up. I can still make the flight.
She says, ‘I will let the kids fail rather than teach them subtraction.’
‘I would rather have an aircraft run over me than teach them,’ I answer, unhooking the microphones.
‘I would rather walk into a turbine than teach them,’ she says, closing the laptop.
‘I would rather sit in a cargo hold and freeze to death than teach them,’ I tell her.
