Mother in Law!

~
as in, I've apparently acquired one! Every time Canadian-in-India and I went anywhere together in Jaipur, people would look from me to her and from her to me and then sidle up to ask consolingly, "is she your ma-in-law?" The third time it happened I just decided to go with it. Cousin and I decided to embroider on the story after a little while: Canadian-in-India became mother-in-law to us both and we used her as an excuse to not buy any of the trinkets on offer. "No, no, our mother-in-law -- that's her -- is with us and she's very strict, she won't let us buy your model of the Taj/the Hawa Mahal/T-shirt/bracelet/necklace/carved elephant with little baby elephant inside it/object of choice." And the crazy thing is that most of the hawkers -- usually kids or women -- would nod in commiseration and leave us alone after that.

Makes you wonder about their experiences of mothers-in-law, don't it?

Though there was one persistent and chatty fellow in Agra, who chatted us up on the walk back from visiting the Taj. After the strict ma-in-law story, he asked why she wouldn't buy his little plastic-floating-in-a-water-bubble-Taj. When we told him that she had no money, he looked us all up and down and said, "But she's come a long way -- I don't know where she's from but she's from somewhere not here. Are you really telling me that she has the money to come all the way to India and see our Taj and pay the Rs.750 foreigners entrance fee for that but doesn't have a measly Rs.10 for me?"

That kind of logic in little kids that age -- he must have been all of 10 -- makes me want to cry because of what it says about their experiences.