The Fat Indian Girl (#2)
The mommy and daddy issues
Meera has an off today, she is lying on the couch and watching television in her spacious four-bedroom apartment in the plush location of Alta Mount Road in Mumbai. The place is a little too big for three people, Meera, her mother and their maid Shanti.
Meera’s mother, Roma Patel has acquired this place and a huge allowance in a very successful divorce proceeding against Meera’s father, Mukesh Ganjawala.
Mukesh is a big investment banker, with more money than he can spend or wants to spend on anything and lesser time than he can give or even wants to give anybody.
Roma was two years old when they separated so she doesn’t remember much of the fights and drama all she knows is she meets her father only once a month and she likes the time spent with her father much more than she likes the other twenty-nine day she spends with her mom. Roma insisted that Meera take on Roma’s last name and not Mukesh’s, Roma thinks it’s only fair because she practically raised Meera on her own.
Meera thinks she is much more like her father and they get along very well, the only reason why she cannot go live with Mukesh is that he is remarried and has a pretty young wife, Rohila, who is not only very hot but also creepily close to Meera’s age. So, Meera insists on spending that one day in the month with her father, in some place outside of his house so she doesn’t have to witness Rohila and Mukesh’s sickening romance.
Roma is the perfect example of an Indian mother trying too hard to uphold feministic and western values but comically failing at it. For instance, she will ask Meera to do stuff like lose weight so she can wear a skimpy summer dress at the same time she thinks it will help Meera score a good husband.
It was Roma’s divorce that affected her greatly, she was a traditional Gujarati girl from Ahmedabad, married to a to-be successful investment banker who was twenty-five, Roma was nineteen at the time. Mukesh was just growing his business when they got married, so they dint think to have kids until five years after the wedding. Within five years of their wedding, Mukesh’s net worth grew to crores of rupees, but in spite of Roma’s million complains he did not have even ten minutes in a day to talk to her.
Roma blamed herself for Mukesh’s inattentive behaviour, she thought maybe because she could not fit into his lifestyle and be a modern Bombay bride, her very hip husband was not getting close to her, she changed everything from her attire to her accent, she started talking like a proper Bombay memsahib, from calling the cabbie bhai-yaaa to using the upper-middle-class Hindi pronoun hum while bargaining with the fruit-vendors. She even replied to most inquiries and statements with a ubiquitous ya-ya and went on to build a collection of sleeveless tops and dresses. She did not realise that Mukesh’s lack of interest dint has anything to do with her, it was just bad timing, at the time when they were married, that is from 1987 to 1994, even if Roma looked like Sridevi’s twin sister, Mukesh wouldn’t have paid any attention to her because he was in love with somebody else — his business.
Meera was born on 4th December 1992, a true-blue Sagittarian, she has all qualities of an archer — flakiness, restlessness, impatience and the ability to blow up at the wrong time.
Roma thought Meera would bring Mukesh and her closer but the exact opposite happened, now that Mukesh had grown his business, he finally had the time to notice how different Roma and he were and he just couldn’t stand the idea of them living together.
It wasn’t Roma’s lack of refinement, as she thought, it was her need to be overly dependent on Mukesh emotionally, and her constant condescending remarks, comparing Mukesh to her friends’ husbands and their romantic milestones, annoyed him to no end. He had not built a million-dollar empire just to constantly be told what a bad husband he was. So, despite Roma’s crazy crying, several death threats and one incident of Roma trying to jump out of the window of their tenth-floor apartment, which she comfortably lives in now, Mukesh left Roma. Roma would have definitely killed herself if she wasn’t promised their four-bedroom flat and monthly alimony that ensures that Roma can vegetate for a living.
Even years after her divorce Roma continues to believe that her lack of sophistication and style was the cause of Mukesh’s lack of attention and their subsequent divorce, added by the fact that she was only a simple housewife. Only if she’d done something in life, Mukesh would like her better, which is why till date, much to Meera’s annoyance, Roma keeps trying all sort of businesses/professions to prove her mettle in the world and fails miserably.
Recently Roma has started blogging and wants to become a life coach, this she decided after shutting down her ethnic saree business, “sarees are going out of fashion now” she told Meera. Now Roma wants to change people’s destiny by being a life-coach.
Meera is secretly thankful that all their household money comes from Mukesh’s pocket and Roma is not financially in charge of her life or Meera and her mother would definitely be living in a dingy room of some distant suburb and Meera would have to travel to work by train every day.
Meera also secretly wishes she does not have to live with Roma. To say they are different is an understatement, where Roma, hurt from the memory of past neglect, tries too hard to fit in. On the other hand, Meera couldn’t care less what anybody thinks of her, yes, she has her insecurities but she is very good at hiding them behind sarcastic comments and pretended apathy.
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