M is for Maranello

One of the most sensible pacts that my husband and I have made is the no gifting policy. Well, it was more for my comfort. I have always found it incredibly difficult to buy the man something he would appreciate and cherish. A typical gift buying conversation would go like this -

Me: “A wallet? A watch perhaps?”

He: ”Please don’t waste money, I already have one of each”.  

Me: “A pen?”

He: “I don’t write”

Me: “A gadget – phone, tab?”

He: “Hmmm... sounds interesting, but let’s wait for the next version to come out”

You get the drift right??

If you use the word ‘fast’ and ‘cars’ in the same sentence anywhere in the vicinity of my husband, you can be sure to see his eyes light up. It is a dream that he knows will never come true – being a race car driver.

So, during our trip to Italy, when I figured we would be crossing Maranello en route Pisa, we just had to make a pit stop (pun intended!) Maranello is best known for the Ferrari factory. Despite being a shoestring budget trip, I decided to splurge on this one occasion and gift him a 20 minute Ferrari drive! It would make up for all the lack of gifting for eternity.

The museum visit by itself had given him such an adrenalin rush, he could hardly make up his mind between a Lamborghini and a Ferrari California. After much thought and deliberation, he went with the latter. We had a person from the shop accompany us on the drive, explaining the controls et al.

Then we hit the highway. Boy! I had butterflies in my stomach, just being a silent co passenger. The revving engine, the wind in my hair, the speed, the roads… I have goosebumps even as I write this! I can imagine how exciting it must have been for him to actually get to drive it.  

The Grip

Has your loved one ever held your hand tight? I mean, like, very tight? Not the romantic tight, but the fear-of-letting-you-loose tight. Well, my husband is an expert at it.

I still remember the first time it happened with K.  We were enjoying a lovely Parisian evening, strolling down Champs Elysees, hand in hand, reminiscing the one year of our married lives that had gone by. I glanced across the road and my eyes fell on two huge, shiny golden letters atop a massive building, intertwined with each other, just like our hands – LV.

He followed my gaze and in what seemed to be a natural reflex, gripped my hand tight. After a few tense, silent moments, I said, “You should know me better than that. I would never spend my life savings on a silly brown bag, with some dead Frenchman’s initials embossed on some poor dead animal’s skin.” The grip eased, heart beats returned to normal, but he still held my hand. As a precautionary measure, I was not allowed to cross the road to even look at the Louis Vuitton showroom. All I could manage to negotiate was a photo from across the street.

As time went by, K learned that I am not the quintessential woman shopper. He is fairly confident that I will not spend irrationally on high value luxury goods / accessories, and by virtue of my abstinence, I do manage to make him spend on the occasional puppy-dog-eyed-sympathy goodie. He takes the word precaution very seriously though. “The Grip” is still very much a part of our lives, every time I walk past shoes and bags.

But all of us have our weaknesses, don’t we? There is this certain thing that I go absolutely ballistic and berserk about. It gives me such a high, I go weak in my knees and I almost pass out with all the adrenalin that rushes through my body. I run from counter to counter like some deranged woman, and my eyes almost pop out with all the darting around. It is… wait for it…. Stationery. Yes – notebooks, pens, paints, brushes, canvass, handmade paper, colours, glitter and all that jazz. So every time I walk into Landmark or even the corner road stationery shop / fancy store, “The Grip” returns, and how! I have never taken him to Hindustan Traders (more on that in a separate post), lest I would probably lose functionality of my hands with his iron hold!

So I have a pile of good looking notebooks, pens et al in my house, of all shapes and sizes and in all colours. K complains about how I never use them, but it breaks my heart to write on something so pretty. He thinks I am crazy, so after much taunting and prodding, I have started putting them to use. One is my contacts book (most contacts are on my phone), another one is my recipe book (not that I cook a huge variety, coz K is the most boring “eater” I have known), another one is my accounts book (you can only imagine how regularly I update that!), another one is my things to do book (I also have Workflowy on my phone ;) and another one is my travelogue (the only book that has considerable writing in it!)

The good part is, K has his weakness too – electronics. By electronics, I mean the whole range. Be it something as small as a circuit board and couple of diodes, or something fancy like a big fat camera or a swanky TV. He hyperventilates when he goes to Ritchie street or Croma or even Reliance Digital for heaven’s sake! So I return the favour by holding his hand tight. Of course, my hands are way too tiny compared to his, so I put my nails to good use. 

K has turned our house into some kind of an electronics lab. As it is, we live in a pigeon hole in Maximum City. (I am told it is quite luxurious by local standards, but it will never compare to the heavenly abodes of Singaara Chennai). To add to it, we have wires running across the living room, lights flickering from black boxes littered around the place. It makes my house look like a space ship in the middle of the night. To add to the sci-fi effect, he constantly embarks on these projects, where he keeps punching in some code or the other – he is making a media server out of our computer or he is turning a mobile phone into a baby monitor amongst other things. Well, I am happy he is putting his engineering degree to good use!

So when he complains about my stationery filling up our tables, I simply glance at all the wires and boxes littered on top of the shoe rack!

It is a good thing that both of us have our weaknesses. We have mutually agreed to have a live and let live policy. We do not accompany each other to our shopping Mecca’s. That way, I can wallow around in Hindustan Traders and the likes without him breathing down my neck and he can bask in the electronics glory in Ritchie Street without me tugging at his shirt every two minutes.

There is so much more to write about our shopping patterns, but more on that later. For now, all I want to tell K is – This is what I did last week :D