Pankaj Tripathi’s mother still hasn’t accepted his wife as a part of the family, is ‘upset’ about their marriage: ‘There was tehelka’

Also read – Pankaj Tripathi was sent to look for a rishta for me, recalls wife Mridula: ‘Broke up that alliance, moved to boys’ hostel in Delhi’

But, she said, her mother had an inkling. So, she instructed her to address Pankaj as ‘bhaiya (brother)’. She said, “There was no way I was going to call him that, so for a while, I started calling him Pankaj ‘ji’. But even that felt odd, so I settled on ‘ji’.” Mridula said that she now calls him ‘pati (husband)’. Addressing why their relationship was so controversial, she said, “It’s still not acceptable. We aren’t blood relatives, but in our culture, it is unacceptable for a woman to be married into a family of a lower stature, if another woman has already been married into a family of a higher stature. And because my sister-in-law had been married above her station into my family, I couldn’t be married into their family, which was considered of a lower stature.”

Mridula said that further complications arose over how her sister-in-law would be addressed. After overcoming several more obstacles, including almost getting married to another man herself, she summoned the courage to tell her father that she wanted to marry Pankaj. She said that she was terrified of telling her mother and sister-in-law, because they wouldn’t take it as well. One morning, she told her father, who had the most surprising reaction to the news. While Mridula was expecting all hell to break loose, her father was unperturbed. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I wouldn’t have wasted time looking for boys,” he told her, but also instructed her to keep the conversation between them for the time being.

He asked for Pankaj to call him up and officially ask for her hand, after which they broke the news to Mridula’s mother. “There was a tehelka, a bawaal. Bhaabhi wasn’t happy, mom wasn’t happy. She was concerned about how he’d take care of me. But slowly, they came around to accepting us,” she said. Mridula said that eventually, both families attended the wedding, but to this day, her mother-in-law doesn’t approve of what happened. “My mother-in-law hasn’t accepted me to this day, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. She’s still upset about this intermingling. But what can we do about it now?” Mridula said.