From Utopia With Love

I have thought of marriage.

'Come, come, Mr N', I can hear you say, 'We all know you had surrounded yourself, albeit inadvertently, with friends who happen to be committed couples. And we've been seeing this trend in you for the past two years. Hence it isn't as though you are not alive to the horrors of wedlock. Any creature in your position would have decided to stay ceaselessly single. And yet you make statements like 'I have thought of marriage'. Tsk-tsk. Your sense of humour is getting queerer by the day.'

Truth though there is in what you allege, let me remind you that there is such a thing known as the eye of imagination. With it I see beyond the committed couples you mention, and gaze into a domestic scenario featuring the woman of my dreams at my side. By 'dreams' I mean, of course, 'terms and conditions'. No classified column can accommodate the entire list of my uxorial requirements, but let me at least present here its salient features.


* I won't marry a gender-generalizer. I tend to size up the character and intelligence of fellow humans on a case-by-case basis and don't let things like their sex, shoe size or bank acc. no. interfere my judgement. I expect my spouse to do the same. So when she accidentally holds the TV remote with its business end in the opposite direction, pointing it at her bosom and pressing the button marked 'Increase Volume'... Wait, that line is turning naughty.
Well, if she messes up something in that fashion (it is altogether a different matter that I am a champion fumbler) and I give her a piece of my mind and she infers that I had just demonstrated male chauvinism, I can only pity her for indirectly stereotyping herself. Under my roof there will be no specific 'wife's duty' or 'husband's duty', no talk of 'All you (wo)men are the same', no chivalry of any kind and no annexure of the Chi.'s name at the end of the Sow.'s.

* This point is obvious: her cerebrum ought to be Mensa material. This includes pithy speech and writing, rational choice-making, quickness of repartee, lateral thinking, colourful imagination, and the capacity to judge whether a cricket ball lofted high in the telly would go for a six or a catch. Equally important is to have a scientific bent of mind and to keep abreast of the latest bubbles in the cauldron of scitech. I mean, I don't want a conversation between us to appear like this:

'Honey, take a look! Cold fusion's been achieved!†'

'Yeah, I was planning to attend the concert myself'

I would prefer a partner with a higher (I+E) Q than mine. Everything should then fall in place.

* At some point in my premarital postproposal days, I will ask my fiancée to write a couple of pangrams in both upper and lower cases, and to copy down a derivation from a Physics text. If, in the days that follow, she notices remarkable brevity in my speech, and hears excuses from me like 'Sorry, I can't make it to our date tonight. I've promised my dog I'll watch an Eastwood with him', she is to understand that the deal's been called off. I'm touchy about handwriting. I can't at the same time reach a climax on my wedding night and be fully aware that she draws little circles on top of her i's and j's or doesn't distinguish between her nus and gammas.

* If my love interest turns out to be a disliker of animals, I won't marry her if she were the last lass on earth. I wish I had a rupee every time a girl has declared to me, 'I just hate cats!' It is with utmost restraint that I catch myself short of the retort 'I appreciate that. Self-hate is the best of hates.'

* Her skin has to be allergic to heavy metals -- in particular, Au, Pt and Ag -- and to transparent allotropes of carbon.

* I don't know why, but I can't bear to see anyone sitting with one leg on top of the other. I avoid such folk. Many a girl in this world has been startled at my request: 'Please put that leg down'. (In the case of boys, I politely catch their upper leg by the thigh and place it on the floor)
My dream girl is not a Sharon Stone.

[Feb. 2012 update: This condition is utterly relaxed.]

* She has to be a Tamil. No regionalism involved here; merely a matter of convenience. Life would be severely annoying if either party were to translate every joke, proverb, song, movie, poem, story, slang usage and so on for the benefit of the other half. Let me illustrate:

O.H.: None of us ever imagined he'd do so sick a thing!
Me: Ha ha ha! Indha poonaiyum paal kudikkumAnu irundhuccho.
O.H.: Sorry?
Me: Well, it was like 'Will this cat too drink milk?'
O.H.: H'm, go on...
Me: I'm done. I just said your colleague was like 'Will this cat too drink milk?'
O.H. (searching my face): Suit yourself.

Besides, I have always felt awkward visiting homes wherein man and wife converse in English. It gets worse when the kids chip in with Blytonesque sentences.

* She must have a sensitive, if not quivering, set of taste buds.
I am one belonging to the Eat While It Lasts school of thought. My early childhood may have seen me detesting the notion of nutrition and feeding the contents of my lunch-box to dust bins. But the moment I touched teenage, Nature, without warning, replaced my intestine with a furnace.

Beyond any doubt
There came about
In my gastronomical
range
An astronomical
change

would Ogden Nash have written on the topic had he lived longer. I came to hog down anything edible that came my way. Wedding halls went short of grub after I left the scene, my parents discouraged my making friends with the refrigerator, table manners were to me distant European habits. Sheer peer presence keeps me tamed at meal-times today.
The long and the short of it is that my lady love must be prepared to be referred to in her circles as Mrs Jughead Jones. What better means for her to strike matrimonial harmony in this regard than to embrace the motto 'Eat and let eat'! The two of us could pitch a tent in the kitchen, ransack restaurants together, embarrass our hosts (and guests), and devour the plant kingdom. May I add here that I have no objection if my sweetheart eats flesh.

* She must have a long wishlist of her own into which I miraculously fit.


P.S.
Reader discretion is advised --
(a) Not every bullet point was written in jest.
(b) References to 'dream girl', 'love interest', etc. pertain to a purely hypothetical woman.

† We are talking about a universe like this, naturally.