You Won. Now Live.

You married the boy you chose for yourself, but nobody mentioned this in the epilogue.

The films end at the wedding. Kissing in the rain, everyone crying, fade to black. Go home satisfied.

Nobody makes the sequel. The one where the girl who fought her parents for this man now has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. Because it involves a lot of very boring adjustment. Very little yearning and even littler rain.

I am one year into being that girl. I have thoughts.

First: the love story part is lovely. Genuinely. I would fight my parents again, same result. The boy is good. This is not a piece about the boy being bad. I want to be very clear about this before I spend the next several paragraphs complaining and being ungrateful.

Right. So.

Here is something I understood intellectually before I got married and emotionally only after: living together is not a preview. Vacations together, long weekends, the deeply optimistic phase of a relationship where you are on your best behaviour and the worst thing that happens is someone takes too long in the bathroom. None of it is the real thing.

Real life is quieter, more administrative, and involves many more conversations about where the atta dabba should be, and why the blanket needs folding a certain way.

I have opinions on folding the blanket. Strong ones. This was not information available to my husband before. And I didn’t know he has strong feelings for guava, maybe stronger feelings than he has for me.

But adjusting with your partner is honestly the easy part. It is, at least, mutual. What is harder to name, and funnier (in the way that things are funny only when you cannot say them out loud) is adjusting into a whole new family.

His family is warm. Everyone loves me how you are supposed to love a new person who has joined your family. His brother is genuinely my friend. An actual person I want to hang out with regardless of the marriage. The relationship exists on its own terms.

And I am still adjusting. Every day, a little bit. Learning the rhythms and the customs and the unspoken rules of a household that ran for decades without me in it. Everyone’s way makes complete sense to them. It may not make any sense to me, but how does it matter. I am the variable.

We live in Bangalore, neutral ground. Neither of us is technically home. Very modern. Very equal. And yet, in the past year, we have been to his family’s home in Lucknow more times than mine. I have said this sentence casually in conversation. People nod. Like it is simply information.

Which it is. It is simply information about which way water flows.

Last Diwali, I was in Lucknow. His family was warm. The diyas were lit. The mithai was excellent. I was completely fine. By that, I mean I did everything correctly while a part of me kept missing the puja at my home with my parents and how the light falls at my house, and how I used to make rangoli outside the house. I said nothing to anyone except I cried a lot in the shower. I think I did a very good job overall.

A friend told me recently, 3 years into her marriage, that she still doesn’t feel at home at her in-laws’. To which my husband replied, “because it’s not your home.”

And I thought: right. That’s the answer. Not adjusting more. Not adjusting better. Just not being required to, eventually.

Because the expectation that it will feel like home is the problem. Not the family. Not the marriage. The expectation. You cannot be assigned belonging. You cannot unpack your bags into someone else’s decades and call that home because the wedding card said so.

I fought my parents for the right to choose this person. The culture, generously, let me have that. What it hasn’t quite updated is everything after. Who adjusts. Who moves. Whose habits are the default and whose are the variable. The girl who made the loudest, most deliberate choice of her life still finds herself, one year later, figuring out where to put her things.

So, here in Bangalore, I put everything where I want to, and my husband adjusts. Just for equality’s sake, you know.