My Most Difficult Relationship

He is the most obnoxious person I have ever met.

He is very difficult to talk to and I never had a good relationship with from day one. Unfortunately, we have known each other for decades and I cannot avoid meeting him, as he is a very close relative.

He is smart and reasonably good looking but a very sloppy dresser; he has no dress sense at all. He thinks jeans are God’s gift to mankind, suitable for any business or social occasion. He wears them in summer or in winter, rain, shine or snow. He dresses only for his own comfort, never caring for how he looks. He shaves whenever he feels like, and it is not every day. He should really grow a beard, but he finds it too irritating, just like his personality.

His wife is a wonderful lady from a very decent background. I really cannot understand why she married a slob like him.  Is it because he is a well-qualified engineer? Is it because she didn’t know what she was getting into? Obviously, she didn’t know him well enough because they had an arranged marriage. She should have seen the warning signs: he was an only son completely spoiled by his mother. However, like most naïve Indian girls, she thought she will improve him after marriage but it doesn’t work that way, at least not with Indian men.

This guy is not really into housework, and he only does what he is told to do, and that, too, after multiple reminders. He does mow the lawn now and then, but only after a lot of procrastination, just like the way he shaves once in a while. He might sometimes cook a dish or two, but only after making a big deal out of it. He does make coffee for his wife, but it’s one of the very things he does around the house. Yes, he will clean the dishwasher or even take out the garbage or put things back in their place, but he can never do enough to please his perfectionist wife.

He has weird eating habits. He likes to eat with just one or two dishes; if you take him to a buffet, he gets confused as he just can’t deal with multiple choices in real life. He is ok with simple stuff like Chana Bhatura, Idli Sambhar or even daal Chawal. He will also eat a burger with fries, preferably vegetarian. In fact, he will eat almost any kind of simple food as long as it is rich and nutrition-free. Sometimes, he will get up in the middle of the night and heat up a samosa for himself. What normal human being ever does this?

I find him very difficult to get along with; he is so opinionated with the weirdest notions about so many things. Just as an example, he believes all religions are true and deserve the same respect and that there should not be any differences between people based on caste or social status. Come on, in this day and age, who would want to believe this? He believes in respecting women and treating them as equals of men, but he is defying all social norms and thousands of years of cultural traditions.

This guy reads a lot of books, just to pass the time. This gives him the strange notion that he is well-read. He believes he is a good engineer, but I think he is mistaken. He spends far more time writing blogs than in doing real engineering work.

He is also very lazy. He loves to sit still and do nothing, only he calls it meditation. He does a bit of yoga now and then, but, again, he is lazy, and his favorite posture is the relaxation posture, or Shavasana. He is smart enough to disguise his laziness – he calls it simplicity.

He acts like a kid most of the time, or, should I say, a spoilt puppy. As his long-suffering wife knows, it is difficult, if not impossible to house-train him properly. He will make a mess in the house, apologize for it and then make the same mess again. Like a puppy, he loves to go out of the house, and go out for a drive any day of the week, sometimes for no reason at all.

He plays with his grandkids as though he is the same age as them. He has no maturity whatsoever, even after decades of living in this world and pretending to be a house holder. He has a crazy sense of humor and loves to twist words and spellings around. Just as an example, he thinks karma is makar, meaning a crocodile, because it grabs you and holds on to you for a long time. What a weird notion and, I am sure, nobody else finds it funny.

If you see this guy heading in your direction, please step out of the way. Unfortunately, I cannot do the same because he lives inside my skin and writes blogs under my name.