Uncharitable Sunday Thoughts

A pastor’s wife mortified me once and I’ve never been able to forgive her. Every time something happens that reminds me of the incident, I get triggered again and I feel the same revulsion. It is quite hilarious to the people who know about it. It amuses me too but also, I am still upset about it.

It was a seemingly innocuous incident.

I am nosy. And I am curious. Call it a character trait. If there is drama, I could pop out of my blanket in the dead of winter just to go check it out. And when there are performances in church, I go early and scoop out the best seats so I can get the best view.

Which is what I did one Easter Sunday in Delhi, back when the whole DMI would meet as a congregation at Green Park. I was there before the church bells rang, excitedly sitting in what I considered the seat with the best view. The actual performers had not even reached the church for rehearsals, is how early I was for church.

And then the congregation filed in one by one until the church was buzzing with activity. The church soon filled up with churchgoers and someone started singing and everyone joined in. A few minutes before church actually started, the pastor’s wife from the first paragraph walked in, made her way over to me and my sister sitting there on our very good seats, tapped my shoulder and said: “This is my seat; I always sit here. Kindly go find some place else to sit.”

I was very young, only in college. I was also pathologically shy and an introvert who had not found her way out of the cocoon even for short bursts of social energy. When a grown ass woman asks you to move out of your seat in full view of an entire church, and catching more attention every minute because it is the Law Of Societal Attention-Grabbing that the more sombre the affair the more pronounced the effects of any single feckin’ deviation, you just do.

I am ashamed to say I moved out of my seat and searched for another seat in the by-now-crowded room. If the same shit were to happen to me today, I would not have moved. I would have created a scene right then and there. The quiet rage I felt when I realised the woman was a pastor’s wife has since coloured every single feckin’ view I’ve held since of anyone who is a pastor’s wife. My first thought is invariably: Are you also an entitled Good Christian Bitch?

Uncharitable. But also imprinted in my brain. Unfortunate, isn’t it?