The long and the short of it

How tall can tall be? Ask my husband who is 5 feet and 10 inches tall but never forgets to remind me at 4 feet 11.5 inches that it's almost one foot away. The 0.5 bit is not only crucial but critical as every millimeter counts when you are reminded of your elevation - or the lack of it - 24x7.
From our days of dating to marriage and after, my height has been a subject of discussion, ridicule and smug arrogance, mostly by the in-laws who were aghast at losing their 'tall' good-looking son from Bihar to an average city girl like me."Ek to choti, upar se koi dahej nahi. Yeh bhi koi shaadi hai?" they would crib. So despite being the badi bahu, I was usually not taken seriously.
That, and similar issues would be the trigger for all fights that took place thereafter. But any argument I tried to initiate would end up being a monologue - with me scurrying up and down, failing to keep pace with his long strides as he tried to avoid the confrontation. When my nagging and running around got tiring for me and tiresome for him, my kind-hearted husband would plonk himself on a chair or the bed, gesturing me to come near and say, "Ab level ki baat karte hain. Bolo."
With my head held high, I would tell him that all great men and women were short and reel off the names of Mahatma and Kasturba Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri or Nehru. "Besides you have to look down to talk to me, while I look up." A lesson well learnt and even better rehearsed since my mother drilled it in when I was a kid. Of course none of this cuts ice because he would promptly but calmly retort with, "But you must look up to a great man. Besides, I wonder where you would be if I had not kept an eye out for you." The man is tall and has an ego to match his height.
On family holidays or when photographs are being clicked, he makes it a point to pump his chest and stand stretched out in full glory next to me, despite my telling him to lean in a little so that we don't look like the 'Khali couple' (the huge wrestler). "Let them see the right size," he insists. And then later points out how he could have simply scooped me up in one arm and saved a few inches of the frame. Thankfully in our wedding photos we were both sitting and the contrast isn't that stark.
At home, the kitchen shelves are organised according to our heights. While the lowest shelf has chai, tea cups and instant soup packets for me, the top shelves stock beer mugs and other such items. When the clothes come from the press walla, I neatly put mine in the cupboard, which obviously is the lower shelf and leave his lying around for the want of a stool to reach his shelf. It's another matter that those clothes never get put into the cupboard at all.
Our friends think we're cute and he agrees that the 'cute' factor comes from me. When we were dating, he would talk of putting me in his pocket and carrying me around. These days, he makes it a point to remind me not to grow horizontally, lest he finds it difficult to locate me in the house. "Since you have no scope vertically, be careful of your girth. It will be very difficult to look out for you then," he says.
Recently, he picked up a jacket and a pair of shoes for me on a trip abroad. "Thank God for well-built American kids," he chuckled, handing me clothes from the kids section. My solace in such times comes at social dos like weddings and parties, where he's invariably 'uncle' and I'm 'didi' for the bachcha log.
meenakshi.sinha@timesgroup.com
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