He knew exactly how he felt at that moment, and it was not a pretty thought or feeling; he was the egg that was ripe for fertilization – the sex was over, the pleasure of the orgasm had died down a while ago, and now all that was left was this – the dread of the morning after and the consequences that come with them. A million sperm were hurtling towards him, and all he wanted to do was run and hide so they couldn’t catch him. But he knew better - this was the natural order of things and he was resigned to his fate.
Hardly a week had passed since he had returned from the UK, but even that was too long for his mom to wait – she was already planning his wedding. Who was he kidding – she had been planning it from the moment he had been born and she knew it was a boy. After all, in her world and the one he was having trouble understanding, the male child is a status symbol, one you can auction off for the best price once you’ve dressed him up with a fancy education, even if it is a degree from a tiny college in a god-forsaken town in rural England for which you had to pay through your nose.
And so here he was – his carefree bachelor days were drawing to a close and he was supposed to “choose” a bride, someone he had never met before, marry her, and live happily ever after? If his mom had her way, the girl would be rich enough to have loads of money yet not too rich that she could flaunt her wealth and use it as a weapon, educated enough to boast about to relatives but not so much that she outshone her son, pretty enough so that her son was the envy of the neighborhood yet not so much that the beauty went to her head, capable enough to run the household yet not so much that she would dethrone the reigning queen (his mom of course), and most important of all, fertile enough to bear her two grandsons – as she had told him once too often, she “understood” today’s girls and so would not be greedy and ask for more. He wished he could tell her that it was the male factor that determined the sex of the baby and that the woman had nothing to do with producing a boy or a girl, but he saved his energy as he knew it would fall on ears that pretended to be deaf to things they didn’t want to acknowledge.
He was not averse to the idea of marriage per se; what he protested against was being used as the bait to catch the biggest fish in the pond. His mom thought he was both the cream and the cake, yet only he knew that he felt more like a lump of meat on a butcher’s auction block, waiting to be sold to the highest bidder. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend who he wanted to marry, and although he had had his share of women (how many exactly is one’s share by the way?), they were all in his past, the remnants of his happy-go-lucky youth. And since he had never been in love, he was open to the idea of an arranged marriage.
He thought of the woman who would soon become his partner for life – she need not be beautiful but I should like the way she looks, education does not matter as long as she is intelligent (he was wise enough to know that the two were entirely different entities), she should be a good friend more than a wife, and yeah, it wouldn’t hurt if she enjoyed sex instead of looking at it as something that needed to be hurriedly done in the dark or as just the act of procreation. If he had told his mom all this when she asked for his preference, she would have cut off his tongue – if she hadn’t fainted in shock before that.
The next few months were a blur – he remembered just wanting the damn thing to be over and done with; he had reached a point where he didn’t care who he married just as long as his mom stopped obsessing over every tiny detail. But fate was kind to him – he married someone who was not perfect, but made the perfect foil for him. His mom was happy with her daughter-in-law, mostly because the latter was resourceful in buttering her up in every possible way so that the relationship was smooth. And he was content with life and thankful he never had to go through the rigmarole of choosing a bride ever again.
Two years down the line, he knew he had thanked fate too soon – the gleaming glint in his mom’s still-youthful eyes spoke volumes when the doctor emerged from the labor room with the “good” news that his newborn was a boy, and he sank to the nearest chair wondering if God would have been inclined to listen to him if he had prayed harder for a girl!!!
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