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Difficult wife
Gifts were a post-marriage phenomena and short-lived, like verse and Urdu. Everything Uday bought Ambika was rejected, writes Kumkum Chadha
When Uday Soni recited Iqbal and Ghalib to Ambika Sen, now Union minister and till recently stationed at Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s office, she was impressed despite not understanding a word of the intricate language. Desperate to be on the same wavelength as her poetic suitor, Ambika pleaded with her cousin to teach her a few couplets which she could recite to the love-struck Uday. Mugging up lines was child’s play, the meaning immaterial as long as it was in the genre of romantic poetry. Consequently, that evening, when the 19-year-old Ambika reeled out lines, Uday was horrified: she wished to part. It needed the English language for her to tell him that her cousin had played a cruel joke on her. After that, she never dared Urdu.
Had the courtship been longer than three months, the honeymoon period would, perhaps, have been over before the betrothal. When he lectured her on marriage being all about freedom and trusting each other, she thought he was having an affair and preparing her for what lay ahead.
Gifts were a post-marriage phenomena and short-lived, like verse and Urdu. Everything Uday bought Ambika was rejected, beginning with a pair of shoes from Mexico, which he had to return because she could not bear their sight. The shopkeeper, initially reluctant, finally gave in, primarily because he had, to quote Uday, a “first-hand experience of what difficult wives were all about”. She was a lot kinder to a black velvet cape which he later bought, though initially sniggering at the feather sticking out of the hood. “Hideous” was all that she said before she left the room. After Uday told her that he had spent a better part of his savings on the cape, she let it lie around the house instead of seeing it out of the door.
Though buying furniture is an interest common to both, Uday prefers period furniture rather than the Scandinavian straight lines Ambika opts for. “Easier to clean, practical to have around,” she says. Had her fascination for the Ganesha begun earlier, life for Uday would have been a lot easier. By the time she took to the elephant figure some ten years ago, Uday had stopped taking risks on shopping sprees. That he is charged with being indifferent to anniversaries and birthdays is another matter. “Die if you do, die if you don’t,” he says.
That apart, life has been fun as a foreign service officer’s wife, where travelling and pub crawling was part of the deal. Considering that she had nursed ambitions of joining the IFS, Uday’s tenure was God-sent except when they had to entertain. “While we ordered most of the food from outside, I struggled with chapatis, which I never got right.” For someone who spent her childhood driving jeeps rather than entering the kitchen, cooking was a nightmare.
‘Ambo’ for her father and ‘Amby’ to others, Ambika never used the family name Wadhwa. Sen was an offshoot of her father, Nakul Sen’s name, which she used till she took the nomenclature Soni post-marriage.
