The Mother-in-Law by Veena Venugopal

Author:Veena Venugopal [VEENA VENUGOPAL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143419877
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Peacekeeping Mission

Name

Age (in 2013)

Husband

Married

Supriya

39

Robert

2001

All relationships are the result of strategy. That first meeting might be pure serendipity, though in some cases even that is the result of years of planning. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been reading enough trashy newspaper stories about how Kate Middleton picked the college that Prince William was going to just so she could plan to accidentally bump into him. But even for us non-aspirants to royalty, the evolution of a relationship is the result of how we decide to play the game.

In the strategy-laden universe of all relationships, it can safely be said that there is none more tactical than the one with the mother-in-law. Every daughter-in-law has a strategy for Mummyji even before the first meeting. Some think they should be coy and conservative. Others are belligerent and spoiling for a fight—‘I am not going to take her bullshit, I’ll have her know.’ Some others pretend to be pushovers—they agree to everything they are told and then go ahead and do what they wanted to anyway.

Then there is a small minority of reformists. Like a UN peacekeeping mission, they decide that they will be the glue that holds together the mother and the son. These are women who have known their husbands long before they marry them. They are privy to detailed accounts of family feuds. And as the objective third party, they can see the situation for what it is—a miasma that can be fixed with some magic dust.

Supriya was one such reformist. She met Robert through her brother. The boys were best buddies and spent an inordinate amount of time in each other’s homes. Supriya’s brother and Robert qualified as architects and, while her brother left the city to pursue his career elsewhere, Robert found a job in Delhi and stayed on. Supriya and he continued to meet. They were friends. And confidants. The redeeming part of a bad day, for both of them, was the telling of it to the other, over a glass of beer in the evening. Even though they felt a strong physical attraction to each other from the day they met (‘We wanted to do each other from the word go’ as Supriya put it to me), they didn’t get together until much later. This was a relationship that was firmly rooted in friendship and, through good times and bad, the friendship stayed.

Robert often talked to Supriya about his family. It was a difficult relationship. Robert felt that they hadn’t supported him and regarded them as a source of a great deal of anxiety. Inevitably, Robert’s most complicated relationship was with his mother. He did not get along with her at all. They have always fought, often over trivial reasons. But when he told Supriya about these fights, it was as a joke. The worse the incident, the funnier would be his story.

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