Not the brahmin's wife

I've just done a google search on 'brahminwife' to see if my blog turned up. (It didn't.) So as suggested by Google-ji, I amended the search to 'brahmin wife'. What came up? No, not some sort of tacky browsers' wives site. And not a brahmin wife in site. The top twenty sites (apart from one reference to a 'Boston Brahmin wife') were all references to the 'brahmin's wife'. Isn't that remarkable. In all cases, the wife was entirely defined by her husband.

Wouldn't happen in this household! And it certainly says something rather unsettling about gender in India.

Dishing Up

You may be wondering - if there is anyone out there in the blogosphere - how this blog is going to turn out. Love story? Sexual comedy?? Whinge-in about the wife??? I've been wondering the same thing. I guess it will be a bit of all three. And I have, if I can ever remember them, a fund of anecdotes to illustrate every side of the experience of being married to a brahmin, and this brahmin in particular. But I rather suspect that I am going to get swept along retelling stories as they happen - the background din of daily life.

Take today, when there was a family lunch. By 'family' I mean, of course, more than the household. I won't give you a cast list of the eight people who sat down for a meal. But I was given the task of serving the food for my son. Why an eight-year-old can't serve himself is a question I've been wondering since he was at least six. But as a good quasi-brahmin husband, I 'did the needful' and plonked a selection of rice, roti, sliced cucumber and the tiniest bit of chicken curry on junior's plate.

I don't know whether I had got the proportions wrong (too much rice and not enough cucumber perhaps), or laid the items out in an unaesthetic manner, or simply had crossed some vestigial caste boundary. But the poor boy's plate was snatched away from me for the same food - the very same food, no additions no subtraction - to be dished up, by my wife, on a fresh plate. I was chided for offering rice and roti at the same time - though that's what junior had asked for, and what brahmin bivii-ji gave him (just as I had).

You may be asking: yes, but just what has this got to do with being a brahmin. It's plain and simnple control freakery, and that crosses caste borders. Well, yes it does. But being a control freak assumes that you feel that you have the absolute, unquestioned, untrammelled right to control, and that those you are controlling are in some way lacking (in judgement, sense, discretion, whatever). Now, is this, or is it not, the (and here I may be inventing a word, but it's required) 'brahminly' behavour? Your comment please.

The story so far ...

I've been meaning to do this for ages - and now it's happening. I'm not going to give away too many secrets. At least, not my secrets. But let me say that I've been living in India for quite a while. My wife is Indian. And more than that - she's a brahmin.

What does that mean? Well, keep on reading. I've been married for well over a decade. We have kids. And it's a really successful relationship. Which is down to a lot of hard work and compromises by both of us.

But brahmins are - well, it's a miracle that they have kept going as a caste, given just how fussy and fastidious they are. You will see what I mean a little later on.

Well, I'm started - and who knows where this will lead.