10 Things I Told Myself I Would Never Do Which Turned Out To Be Completely Wrong

I told myself I would never get married

My younger self didn’t know my older self. Just when everyone thought I was committed to singlehood, I surprised myself, and everyone else, by deciding to tie the knot.

Here’s a fun fact which came out of that decision: My brother-in-law Mohammad learned to make his famous biryani, as a result of my deciding to get married.

Here’s the story…

I and another gal from work were getting married around the same time.

Since neither of us was planning on inviting anyone from work to our weddings (my reason was I was getting married in another city, hers was she was having a small wedding), we decided to jointly host a biryani lunch for our co-workers at the office.

We would bring biryani to the office, and have a small celebration for our coworkers, before going off for our respective weddings.

I can still remember the invitation card I wrote for this biryani lunch.  I thought it very clever at the time.  It said “Contract Advertising employees with enough on their plate, get ready for some more”. Inside, the words read “Minoo and Anna’s biryani lunch”.

Anna and I rented big cooking pots from Russell Market. Then we hired a cook from Taj Hotel in Shivaji Nagar to moonlight and cook the biryani for us. He gave us a list of supplies to buy, and we went out and bought them.

The biryani was cooked outside my house (on a firewood stove), the cooking beginning at 6:30 a.m. in the morning.

It was all very exciting, and I invited everyone in the family to watch the biryani being cooked, and help themselves to freshly made biryani after.

My brother-in-law Mohammed was an interested observer at this event.

And this is how he became – as highlighted in my post Our Cake Boss Family - the “biryani master” of our family.

He credits his world famous biryani recipe to watching that Taj Hotel cook make biryani for that Contract Advertising office lunch.

I told myself I would never get married, and this was one of the wonderful outcomes of me doing an about face on myself, another being the birth of my wonderful and amazing daughter Tanita.

Curious to know what else I told myself I would never do, but was completely wrong about…

How about driving?

Here’s the story…

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in India, who did not know how to drive. She tried and tried, okay, she didn’t try and try, but she definitely tried and didn’t succeed. She did not have the spirit of King Bruce and the spider, or the KFC colonel, at the time. The girl settled for going around the city in a pumpkin carriage, called an auto-rickshaw in India. The drivers of the pumpkin carriage frequently found themselves at odds with the girl, because though she looked like she ought to have a decent quantity of Tamil, Kannada, or Hindi words at her disposal, the girl couldn’t so much as manage an “ayo” without getting Sir Robert Clivish on it. The drivers of the pumpkin carriage would throw up their hands every time the girl tried to get into a heated conversation with them in English.  If they had been German, they would have muttered under their breath, “Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof”. You can look that up on LivingLanguage.com, it means, “I don’t understand a thing.”

Anyway, in this state of being pumpkin-carriage dependent, the girl moved to America.  As soon as she surveyed the vast distances of the California Bay Area and the meager public transportation options available to help her criss cross it, the girl clearly heard a voice in her head tell her, “Listen, missy, you need to get behind the wheel of a car, like a baby needs to be potty trained – or your life is going to stink.”

And so began the girl’s quest for a driver’s license.

The wicked stepsisters (her first driver’s ed teacher) told the girl, “You will fail your test, because when I give you instructions, you are not able to follow them. Give me x amount of money, and I will make sure you pass the test and get a driver’s license”. The girl was shocked. She didn’t think this kind of thing prevailed in America. “I will not give you a steekpenning, a dorodokia, a pot-de-vin”, she said to the driver’s ed teacher.

Ok, she didn’t say that, because as you already know, the girl was not good at languages.  Plus she was outstandingly timid in intimidating situations. What she said was, in an apologetic voice, as if she was in the wrong, “I cannot pay you for a license.  If I get a license by false means, I will not have the confidence to drive.”

The teacher didn’t give up. Thinking there was a price at which the girl would succumb, she kept reducing the amount of grease required, to tempt the girl, but the girl was strong; they are not going to put anything on me like they did on Eve in the Garden of Eden, she said. She tied herself to an imaginary rock to avoid the driver's ed teacher's siren call of, "I can get you passed on the test and issued a license."

However, her heart was also sickened, because she knew if the driver’s ed teacher had the power to get her passed on the test, she probably also had the power to get her failed on the test.

And so the girl switched to another driver’s ed teacher.

Unfortunately she fell from the sky only to get stuck in a date palm. ( आसमान से गिरे खजूर में अटके )

The next driver’s ed instructor, was half asleep for the 6 a.m. – 7 a.m. driving lesson, and wanted to remain in that state. So he cleverly made the girl drive on one long road with no traffic and no stops and few lights for most of the lesson, so the girl never learned anything, and of course she failed the test.

At this time, the fairy godmothers (the girl’s family) decided to step in.  They took the girl in hand and became her driver’s ed teachers.  They each took turns to teach her driving.

The girl then took the test and got her driver’s license.

She went on to become a NASCAR driver like Danica Patrick. Nah!  But she did pick up enough confidence to do a trip to L.A. just a few months later.

And she learned all sorts of things connected with cars.

Which is why, she can tell you how to buy a used car with confidence.

She’s done that.

And why she can tell you some of the lessons you can learn from having an accident.

She’s done that too.

Here is the big lesson of these 2 stories – the girl told herself she would never do this and never do that. And it turned out she was completely wrong.

What are you telling yourself that you could be completely wrong about?

It's both an interesting and important question.

Come back next week for more of where this came from –there are lots more things I told myself which turned out to be completely wrong, and I’d like to tell you about them as well.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms, matkas, mat's, majis, ammas, madres, mueters, maders, majkas out there and see you next week - Minoo