Dear PC,

There is something about being home (and by this I mean peed in home - not foryo home) that forces you to readdress (however unsuccessfully) ambiguities of your past. I have been home for just over ten days now - just enough time for one that has not lived here in ten years to get restless - and while I stay largely quiet, I am still pulled into generic conversations about life trajectories that are anything but generic.

For instance -

Extended family visiting from the Gelf, after initial niceties : "We are very broad minded - you have to get married when you are ready"

(Code - When are you getting married? Everyone worries about you. It might already be too late to dip into the iyer pool of eligible SF software engineers)

Random Maami I do not even know that well, says over my mother's freshest filter coffee "Yen Ponnum Kalyanathiku Munaadi Ippida thaan iruntha" (my daughter was also like this before she got married)

(Code - All you new age independent pseudo intellectual girls will have to realize that we will win over you with our pressures of commitment and when we do, you will succumb willingly and be happy)

Fat astrologer, in general conversation, again - "unnaku ithulelaam nambika irukaathey - romba modern ponnu !" (you do not believe in all of this do you? - you are very modern!) and then, to my mother "let her marry whoever she wants - even a north indian - do not ask her before she is a little older - say, next year".

(Code - I have no clue when your daughter will get married. I am just being vague to make you feel happy - even though, it is clear, there is no parallel universe in which you thought you would find this girl a husband. And yes, when I include north Indian in the realm of her matrimonial possibilities- I am trying to show my absolute broad mindedness to the extreme chance that she is all the crazy rebellious things I think she might be.

The chance that she might marry a white boy? What? A white Boy? What? People do that? )

Like I said - I have been home for more than ten days. The initial novelty of a You Ess visitor has faded - Madras has taken me by both blazing red horns and doomed me to its eternally caustic hell of not so polite conversation.

If it was not providing me with so much amusement, I would sigh.

x