Lunch with Asha

Lunch with Asha yesterday. She came huffing and puffing about half an hour late, grumbling about having had to wait over an hour for the bus. Then she apologised for having brought only karela sabzi and chapatti for me for lunch from home, which I didn’t mind since I love the way she prepares karela.

We sat and ate, watching one of my favourite lunch time serials – “Bhabhi” which has recently been fast forwarded so that we are now watching what’s happening twenty years later. Bhabhi, a pretty young thing who still looks and behaves like she’s twenty five, specialises in “making eyes.” The best part is when she registers feelings like shock. Her eyes bulge to such an extent you feel they might drop right out of her head and start to roll on the floor. There was a lot of eye-popping in yesterday’s episode because Bhabi’s daughter is turned down by her husband-to-be, right in the middle of the wedding ceremony because this “bad woman” (I think she is his mother – I haven’t been watching the soap in the last couple of months) has told him that his fiancé is carrying another man’s child. (All false of course but nobody believes it).

After lunch we lay down a bit and chatted. Asha says the next couple of months are going to be very busy for her, what with several weddings ahead. Her sister’s daughter is getting married. How old is the daughter, I asked her. Twenty three, Asha said very authoritatively. I said, Oh. Then how old is your sister? Asha thought about that a bit. Around thirty, she replied.

So I say to her, then your sister must have had her daughter when she was seven years old. Asha finds that hilarious and says, no. No, possibly the sister is a bit older than that, so maybe she is around thirty five. OK, I say, so then your sister had her baby when she was twelve years old. Asha says, what the hell, how am I supposed to know how old she is? Thirty, thirty five, forty. It’s all the same to her. Asha only knows that she herself is definitely fifty two years old and she knows it because she was born the year her family and the entire village converted to Buddhism after Ambedkar’s speech. That was in 1953.