By Prabhneet Kaur
How do you tell your husband soon after you’ve got married that a piece of clothing he loves so much is not going to be liked by his in-laws? That’s right, you don’t. But if he’s also your best friend, you can do the next best thing, that is, hide it in the closet. Word of caution: if it backfires, don’t blame it on me.
For in my case, my husband happens to be a very old friend; so old now that I don’t even know how my life was like before I’d met him. In every other relationship there’s usually a person who is super chill and the other one who detonates quite often. We do swipe roles sometimes but mostly the cool one is him. So hiding his jeans did not have much effect.
There, I said it. I had hidden his pair of jeans soon after we’d got married. But I had my reasons.
He had recently come back after spending 7-8 years in Australia. He hadn’t yet come to terms with India and the need to dress up appropriately according to occasions. On our roka ceremony, for instance, he had come wearing a casual T-shirt, which I’d hated. Not his fault though. Soon after he’d landed, he’d been summoned by my parents for a meeting. His own mother had been so excited to meet him after so long that she had made him eat his favorite dishes all at once. His weight had increased within a couple of weeks and his few formal shirts had turned not half as tight as they’d become shorter. And he’d got no time to shop as even his extended family had gone crazy seeing him after so long. On his second meeting with my parents when his parents were about to come along, someone from my side had suddenly decided to seal the deal with roka ceremony. He’d got to know of it at the last moment. He still curses me for not giving him enough time to be properly prepared but then what can I say now! Even I wasn’t prepared.
Moreover, there’s a huge difference between his parents and mine. My mother-in-law is all for casual, western clothes. She keeps telling me dresses look better on me than traditional suits. My mother, on the other hand, prefers traditional, formal clothes more. So I always knew badly-ripped pair of jeans was not going to impress my mother in those initial years. She had just started to know him back then and first impressions mattered. She isn’t old fashioned per say but I know what pleases her eyes more. So I hid his jeans in my closet and forgot all about them. My husband is such that he usually only decides if he needs to wear formals, casuals or traditional clothes and picks up anything of that sort that’s lying at the top. So I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t ask me about his lost pair of jeans for months.
Close to three years now, he knows I’ve hidden it somewhere but he still hasn’t asked for it once. He could though (and now after reading this, he might as well) because now my mom loves him and what he wears isn’t going to change that at all.