Liquid Desires

The marriage of the twenty four-year-old famous business tycoon Sameer Maheshwari was quiet a big affair in Ahemdabad, given how much success and wealth he had acquired in the recent years. The people might have expected his Nanu, Jaiprakash Maheshwari to get his only grandson married in a considerably wealthy family, but they were proven quiet wrong.

Instead of a family which showed off its wealth and an insensitive girl who wouldn't be able to put up with his beloved grandson, the old man proudly chose a middle-class family and a smart young woman for him.

Everything was perfect. The bride's family was quiet happy at the prospect of marrying off their beloved daughter in the richest family of the city, though the hostile expressions from her Tau Tai was a different matter altogether. The groom's family was also forced to show that they were perfectly happy and content with the choice of the bride, given how groom's Nanu had ignored the protests from his daughter and his extended family. One should also ignore the constant bickering that used to happen between the Maheshwari Mami and the Aggarwal Taiji, and the periodic loud announcement of his meagre income by the bride's father needn't been taken into account. But which marriage takes place without chaos, right?

So it was perfectly normal that Jaiprakash Maheshwari had insisted that the nearest date be chosen for the marriage, and the bride's family had to give in. The auspicious date of 23rd September was confirmed by their Pandit ji, and thus, both families found themselves working tirelessly to make the best arrangements for the big event. The big day hadn't went ahead as they had planned, because an untimely drizzle had destroyed the wedding venue, the Maheshwari Mama and the bride's father had gotten into a tiny brawl, the groom's mother seemed quiet unsatisfied with the taste of the dishes, the elders of the Aggarwal family were feeling neglected and disrespected, the photographers got stuck in the traffic and had arrived quiet late. But keeping in mind the size and the complex execution required for traditional big fat Indian weddings, such tiny events can be ignored. So yeah, everything was near perfect.

There was only one noteworthy problem, the bride and groom hated each other to the core. The groom never lost a chance to pinch the bride's hand, while the young woman was always eager to stump his foot. The groom had skillfully fed green chillies to the bride when he had been asked to feed her during the wedding, and the bride had answered with twisting his fingers during the rasam where they had to find a ring in a pot of milk. The man seemed quiet eager to spill his glass of juice accidentally on his young wife when she was serving food during her first rasoi, and the bride found it amusing to put extra salt in his curry. The occasional pranks continued to a point where they couldn't even accept a glass of water from each other's hand.

However, it wasn't that Sameer Maheshwari had hated Naina Maheshwari on the very time he had laid his eyes on her, or he had disliked her looks, or the samosas she had cooked had somehow ended up poisoning him, all this bottled up anger had started accumulating right away from his eleventh standard. His wife had always been the righteous one and the teacher's pet, and she hadn't thought twice before complaining about him while he was justly teaching a lesson to the rival gang. Naina had skillfully entered his bad books from then on, and he did everything to make her life a living hell.

On the first day he had skillfully poured fevicol on her entire bag and geometry box, which resulted in the hilarious sight where Naina stuffed her belongings in other's bags. The next day he had flipped her backpack inside out and shoved it into the smallest pocket in the front, so she had to spend her time after class flipping her backpack to the way it was. On the third day, he had removed the bolts holding her chair together in her class, so that the chair fell apart and she fell down. He had been satisfied then, but she had finally joined the dots because the next week, she had punctured his bike's tyre. He had then thrown colour filled water balloons on her, while she had requested a trustable boy from her class to lock him in the bathroom. He literally spent two hours there! The fight then turned much more serious, where he had destroyed the book she had borrowed from the library, while she had applied glue on his chair, resulting in his pant getting torn. Such little pranks happened a lot in the last two years of his school, and he couldn't express how relieved he was, when he had enrolled in a reputed and Naina Aggarwal-less college.