How cheap!

Was reading Bill Bryson (Notes from a big country) and came across this

"My father, one of the history's greatest cheapskates, was of the view point that there was no point in spending money on..well on anything really..."

and quite sheepishly, but I admit, it instantly brought flashback like memories from my own childhood.

Just that in the aforementioned sentence, I need to replace the word "father" with "mother".

My father, in fact, has been forced (very unsuccessfully) into being a cheapskate by my mother all of these 34 years they have been married. In a sense that when Papa went grocery shopping and bought even one thing other than that on the shopping list, my mother would throw a fit.

"What will WE do with Tabasco sauce????"

"Now, was there a need for wasting 50 rupees on this? Do you know what all could be bought in those 50 Rupees?”

These were questions that she did not really want answers to, but clearly Papa would not take the hint and tell her what all we could make with the Tabasco sauce and other things he could get in those 50 rupees. So, then it became sort of violent and very disturbing. Mostly, I would feel like going back to the shop and return “the absolutely useless thing” on my father's behalf and if possible get an apology letter from the shopkeeper to be so brash as to sell something so inane as Tabasco to my poor little gullible Papa.

In addition to being a painfully stringent "housemaker", mum being an obsessive lover of her own cooking did not help at all. This pretty much meant she had to compare the food of ALL restaurants in the world to her own food, after which she eventually declared"

a) the restaurant food was just not good enough - too spicy/ too bland/too cold/too stale..

b) it was certainly not worth the money “the scoundrels were charging”.

As if this was not enough to make the rest of us feel bad to choke on our food, this also was followed by her favourite question:

'Do you know in 500 rupees what all I can cook at home?'

My sister and I just rolled our eyes and Papa, as usual, tried to answer her. (Papa!)

And similarly, we would not go to the movies because - yes, you guessed it right - in the price of the tickets, we could watch 3 movies on the VCR. Also, according to her, for the price of one bucket of popcorn she could make 'pakoras' at home for the entire neighbourhood!

And so, home-made/cheap things were always a part and parcel of our lives, second hand books, home-stitched clothes even at weddings and parties – which reminds me - how I wore a frilly-frockish looking red home stitched skirt for the farewell of Class X – when all other girls in my class were dressed in sexy sarees and flowy things! it was more like a class 2 birthday party dress. It did not get better even in class XII – I wore something I had borrowed - that too my sister's friend, I think.

So, when we were kids, most of our lives have revolved around the question

"Do we know what humble homemade mundane things can be done with money that people waste on luxuries (such as tabasco and popcorn)?'

But strangely, the point of all this is not how embarrassing this is to recount or how unfortunate this was – instead, I look back and thank her for putting a lot of “money sense” into our heads.

We turned out to be reasonable ‘savers’ and not shopaholics. We learnt to cook all sorts of lovely food. And we still turn around the label to check the price on everything and weigh in our heads “Do we know what else we could buy in that money that would not seem like a waste”.

So, thank you, Mom – a very annoying childhood can sometimes lead to a financially stable adulthood.