Behaving My Age

It’s that time of the lifetime when you finally have to change skins to become a responsible human being while your inner soul still pretends to be a kindergarten brat; that time when speaking shit comes as easy as a storm in a desert and listening patiently seems a task next to impossible; the age when the conscience about one’s own stupidity does not show up and everything that you say sound pearls of wisdom to yourself; when doing household tasks seem the most crucial KRA of your maid and you helping her in the same implies deduction in her salary; when the fact that you earn and work in an MNC overpowers everything else left to do in the world, including cooking and when you look in the mirror and feel tad too proud of the way you look and wonder who on Earth would be able to match that nerve and fail to find one name, even close – YES, this age, this time, this phase – PRECISELY this is when THEY decide to get you married!

It’s like taming a mad ape – accepting that you are getting married and knowing that you get to be the female in this setup – the traditional one who behaves the way others program her to. The one advice, order, request or commandment that you hear from all the directions, while you happily behave the way you have been doing since ages, is “behave your age”. “Well, I’ve been all the same!” is all I can say in return. Suddenly, everything you do right from dressing to walking, from speaking to shutting up, from eating to picking your utensils up from the table, from getting up in the morning to pretty much, existing starts to appear faulty to those people who loved every bit of whatever nonsense you did before THIS time.

Now, I try to behave my age – in fact the one well ahead of it. It will, obviously, take me some time to shed the skin I have been comfortably living in since ages. But all that I have got to do is try to monitor how I behave, timing my smile, gauging the number of times I nod, looking at all random places while keeping mum in a room where the topic being discussed seems as stupid as the arguments being thrown to defend each other by the people involved, checking the usage of words like shit, crap, fuck, bitch, booh and trying to fit in a circle of “all grownups”.

Or, I have got an easier way out! I believe in order to get a valid visa to be able to step into the shoes of an “espoused”, all that you need to do is screw this gyaan up and team with your spouse up for a bigger mess. You never know, he might already be choking himself while acting a “grownup”. Behaving your “self” over your age is a nice idea for a cool, relaxed life. I bet behaving my age would never come easy to me, especially when I know I am good when I am “a lady” but I am much more a fun when I am “me”.