Up the garden path

Falling in love in the times of Corona

Dear readers, I have a confession to make. I have been unfaithful. Over the last few weeks, I have been cheating on my long-time love on a regular basis. And what’s worse is that I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it.

Well, partly, at least it is the fault of my long-time love, or as you may know it, Lodi Garden. Once the lockdown was relaxed in Delhi and it was possible to go for a walk in its sylvan surroundings, I excitedly donned my sneakers and mask and headed out for my evening constitutional.

Suffice to say that it didn’t go well. Even though I went in the late afternoon, when the park is usually relatively empty, this time around it was teeming with people. I may have made my peace with that if it hadn’t been for the fact that about 50 per cent of these people were not wearing masks (or had them dangling from their ears or draped around their necks). So, I spent all my time gesturing to them to put their masks on properly, or asking them to do so in my most polite tones. Of course, nobody paid the least attention.

So, after a traumatic 45 minutes of this, I finally gave up the good fight and headed back home, convinced that I had contracted Covid because of my love for Lodi Garden.

Two weeks on, it was clear that I hadn’t been infected with anything other than a seering distaste for repeating that experience. That’s when I turned my lusty gaze to another beauty that had been hovering on my horizon for a while. I speak, of course, of Sunder Nursery.

Sprawling across 90 acres and boasting of manicured lawns, wild woodland areas, sparkling water bodies, effervescent fountains, and historic monuments, this green wonderland had been sending out its siren call to me with every picture I saw on Instagram. So, I finally gave in to temptation and headed there one evening.

Would you consider me a promiscuous so-and-so if I say that it was love at first sight? Would you judge me if I said that the wonder that is Sunder Nursery drove the amazing beauty of Lodi Garden right out of my mind? Would you call me a faithless lover because I switched allegiance in the course of one evening?

Well, never mind, I will take the name calling in my stride. And that’s because the stunning splendor of my new love more than makes it worth my while. 

For one thing, there’s the fact that the gardens are blissfully empty compared to crowded pathways of Lodi Garden (the entrance fee may have something to do with it). There are vast, empty stretches where you don’t see another human being for ages. So, it’s perfectly safe to remove your mask for a few minutes to breathe in the air redolent with the smell of freshly cut grass or the scent of petrichor. I can’t begin to describe what a luxury it is in these times of Corona to have the breeze waft gently against your naked face and have the sun kiss your entire visage.

Just like Lodi Garden, here too the landscape is littered with historical monuments that have been painstakingly restored. So, when the heat becomes too much, you can take refuge in the cool interiors of these centuries old structures, and bathe in the aura of antiquity they exude.

And then, there are the birds. There is, in fact, an entire habitat that has been given over to peacocks, where you can sit around and watch them frolic. If you are patient, you may be lucky enough to see a peacock unfurl his feathers and honour you with a private dance performance.

It’s not just peacocks and peahens, either. The grounds are littered with birds with brightly coloured plumage (one day I will find out what they are all called). And if you stay late into the evening, you don’t even need to plug in your earphones and listen to music. You can, instead, revel in the sound of birdsong.

So, are you surprised that I am in love? Yes, I guessed not.

Belly up

Why men and women get fat after marriage

I’m sure you’ve noticed this as well. Most people tend to get a little bit chubby once they are married. I’ve always put it down to the fact that women generally starve themselves to their smallest dress size in the run-up to their weddings, so a little bit of weight gain after the event is par for the course. And that men are finally getting large home-made meals rustled up by the wife (okay, okay, I know this is a gross generalisation – so go ahead, shoot me) so the pounds tend to pile on.

But what was clear from empirical evidence has now been proven by medical research. Last week, at a press conference in Athens, Dimitris Kiortsis, president of the Hellenic Medical Association for Obesity, announced the abdominal obesity – or in less fancy terms, belly fat – was the most serious health problem among married people. Married men were three times more likely to have big bellies than unmarried men, and married women were twice as likely to be a tad paunchy than their single counterparts.

The survey was conducted on some 17,000-odd married couples between the ages of 20 and 70 and concluded that the reasons for the weight gain were two-fold. One: married couples spent more time slumped on the sofa watching television and eating large meals together than single people. And two: their sex lives dwindled over a period of time so they did not get enough aerobic exercise to burn off all those extra calories they were consuming. (Needless to say, they didn’t make it to the gym either.)

Well, you know how it goes. You’ve spent many years struggling to keep the weight off, trying your best to look buff and well-toned in an attempt to attract a suitable specimen of the opposite sex for some love and romance. When you finally find that special someone and things go well enough to set a date, all your attention is focussed on looking your absolute best on the big day. After all, you’re going to have to live with the pictures (and the interminable video footage) for the rest of your life.

It is any wonder then, that the moment you unpack your bags in your honeymoon suite, you can’t wait to order up a hamburger and fries from room service, washed down with liberal quantities of beer. You can’t skip dessert after a slap-up meal at the fancy hotel restaurant. And all those sexual callisthenics the night before mean that you are ready for a huge fry-up at breakfast.

So, by the time you come back home to start life as a freshly-minted married couple, you are already a few kilos heavier. And then, it’s a slippery slope to borderline obesity as you entertain – and are entertained by – friends and family to celebrate your new status. Once things settle down a bit, you heave a sigh of relief to finally to sit down to a proper meal with your spouse, rather than gobbling a hurriedly cobbled-together sandwich as you did in your single days.

Then there’s the fact that sometimes new wives take the whole appealing to a man through his stomach a tad too seriously. And more often than not, men fall for the gambit.

But however things pan out in every individual marriage, the end result is that most husbands and wives are much fatter a year after their wedding day. Soon, as one kid arrives followed by another, the pregnancy fat takes up permanent residence around the woman’s midriff. And the husband seems to put on weight almost as if in empathy with his partner’s increased girth.

Yes, husbands and wives do begin to look like each other after a few years of marriage. Or at the very least, their bellies certainly do.

So, why do both men and women let go of themselves as soon as the ring is on the finger and the curtains are up in the new matrimonial home? Is it because neither of them really cares about being sexy and appealing to the other now that he or she is a done deal? Do married people no longer care about how they appear to their spouses because they take them for granted?

Or is it marriage itself that takes the fizz out of things? Does the early excitement of married sex fade too quickly, becoming a boring, bland, vanilla version of what went before? Does one set of appetites replace another once the initial thrill of waking up to the person you love wears off? As the weight piles on, do you end up finding the pork belly simmering gently on the stove more appealing than the little porker snoring in the marital bed?

Going by recent research, it would certainly seem so.

It’s not for nothing that alarm bells start going off in a marriage the moment the husband or wife starts on a new diet or exercise regimen to lost weight. The general view is that this is a signal that the newly-slim party is cheating on his or her spouse – or is, at least, thinking about it. And in most cases, this suspicion is right on the button.

So, maybe, just maybe, married folks should just make their peace with those big bellies. After all, the alternative could be a lot worse.

The Tiger’s tale

When it comes to cheating, men and women are equal opportunity offenders

So, Tiger Woods turned out to be just another lying, cheating philanderer who played around on his wife. Over the years, as is now revealed, he has had a string of affairs, of the no-strings-attached variety, with a succession of bar hostesses, models and party girls. As of now, the (very voluptuous) body count stands at six but by the time you read this it may well have gone into double figures.

So far, so sports star.

Yes, by now it is a truth universally celebrated by the tabloid press that men cheat. Rich, famous and powerful men cheat even more than others. And rich, famous, powerful sports stars are in a league of their own when it comes to cheating on their (mostly) blonde and beautiful wives.

And yet, no sooner had news of Tiger’s car colliding into a fire hydrant – and of his lovely wife, Elin, breaking the car windows with his golf club (now that must have hurt) ostensibly to rescue him – hit the press, than the usual articles spouting the same old platitudes about cheating men began sprouting all over the media.

How could Tiger do this to his elegant wife, the beautiful blonde who had given him two lovely children, the younger only a few months old? Wasn’t he supposed to be the Nice Guy who was boring as hell, the Original Mr Goodie Two-Shoes who had built up a sporting and endorsement-related fortune on the basis of his squeaky-clean reputation?

But as a succession of hard-faced floozies with identikit pumped-up lips and silicone breasts began pole-dancing – I exaggerate of course, but only a little – out of the woodwork, that reputation lay in tatters at the accident site outside Tiger’s expensive Florida estate house.

Cue a thousand columns and editorials about how this proved that you never could trust men after all. No matter how perfect their public image may be, behind it lay a sordid mess of one-night stands, raunchy phone messages, rough sex, and drug-fueled romps with a series of mistresses in hotel suites across the world – and sometimes (shock! horror!) in the marital bed as well.

Okay, we get it. Tiger Woods is now officially a Bad Guy. But you know what? He didn’t get up to all that extra-marital sex on his own. He was aided and abetted in his cheating by a line of sultry sirens who knew full well that he was married and a father of two. None of these women was under the illusion that this was some grand passion, or that the golfing genius was madly in love with her, or even that this was an affair that would last.

Both parties knew exactly what they were getting into. So, why target Woods alone for letting his libido run riot? Why not point a finger at all those women who were clearly in it for a good time, a few first class trips, maybe an expensive present or two?

Not to mention, the chance to sell their stories, complete with every sleazy detail, somewhere down the line, get their 15 seconds of fame and make a million or two while they are at it? Nobody saves 300 sex-texts, like the appropriately-named Jamie Grubbs did, unless they intend to use them at some future point.

And yet, only Tiger Woods gets pilloried in the press, while his partners in crime get away with becoming C-grade celebrities who can now safely launch a career in show business. Am I the only person who thinks there is something wrong with this scenario?

Or let’s take another rabidly promiscuous man who is never out of the headlines: the astonishingly priapic Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi. If he’s not hosting orgies at his country estate – with world leaders in attendance, no less – he is buying expensive birthday presents for an 18-year-old lingerie model. His Minister for Equal Opportunities (yes, seriously), Mara Carfagna, is a former topless model whom he deputed to look after the spouses of world leaders during the recent G8 summit in Rome. (I can only imagine the delighted whoops of joy from the wives when they found out.)

If anyone has any doubts about how the business of state is conducted by Silvio, they have only to listen to a mobile phone recording an enterprising call girl named Patrizia D’Addario made while in bed with him (and no, they were not playing chess). It was released after the Prime Minister failed to help her build a hotel in her home town, as he had promised before they did the dirty.

When Berlusconi was faced with the tapes and the incontrovertible evidence that he had slept with an escort, he famously declared that he never ever paid for sex. If he had to pay for it, he asked indignantly, where was the joy of conquest?

Well, that’s all right then.

But at least Berlusconi was honest in his own twisted way. The truth is that most men treat sex as a perk of power. But as we deride them for it, let’s not lose sight of the fact that these men couldn’t possibly do so without the active connivance of women, who use sex as an aid to advancement.

When it comes to cheating, men may get most of the flack. But the truth is that in this matter – as in so many others – men and women are equal opportunity offenders.