A good woman.

Ezhundhiru, somberi (Get up, you lazy in Tamil). She would often throw these words at me. Trying to get me moving. Though she has been gone for about eight years now, I still hear her prodding me every time I procrastinate. Thirteen years of relationship. Thirteen years of marriage. Six years of self-imposed separation till she decided to meet her maker. She was a good woman.

It is important who you want to sleep with. It is more important who you want to get up with. After an initial dither, I found my anchor in her. I wanted her by my side every morning. That done, things fell in place. Well, almost. As regards those which didn’t, I wonder if I overestimated my ability to align seamlessly with the realities that were integral to her. Or was it accumulation of multiple, small disappointments in the relationship that she found a tad too overwhelming. Looking back, our coming together was extra-ordinary. Scandalous for most, for its time. That was over three and a half decades back. 

It was the workplace where I met her. A tall, good-looking, soft-spoken and confident person. What added to her persona, per colleagues, was an intriguing combination of her ability to speak her mind (whilst remaining deferential), impeccable angrezi (English, the language) and her choice of saaris (the drape) which she almost always wore at work. Not a very common ensemble at that time in the set up I was a part of. To sum up, she stood out without being in-your-face. The work led us to interact frequently. She was a Madrasi. Every geography south of the Vindhyas was Madras for me earlier.  By extension, she was a Madrasi. It was only later, when I started knowing her, I acknowledged that there was more to the South beyond Madras and that she was a Tamil. She was from Bengaluru. It showed in her cosmopolitanity. Emboldened by my exposure to masala-dosai during my college days, I would confidently fault her for her dosai-chutney sans sambhar. As we moved a few notches up the relationship, I would pinprick her for her ilk dripping rasam down their elbows as they ate the staple rasam & arisi (rice). You couldn’t have blamed me as I too was on my own staple of Hindi films those days which frequently stereotyped the South in many uncouth ways. I didn’t stop there. I would often rag her for her inability to separate “k” (क) from “kh” (ख) in Hindi. Her gaffes could turn a simple greeting “kya khabar hai?” (how are things?) to an unseemly “kya kabar hai” (what a grave !). Mixing up genders, every time she took a stab at Hindi, gave me yet another proverbial stick to beat her with. Lay it on the UP-wallah in me for wanting to be clever by half. She would giggle my juvenility off like any condescending Iyengar would whilst facing an uninitiated Pande. We did feel good in each other’s company. 

She was older than me. No, it wasn’t enlightenment of any kind that prompted me not to attach any importance to age. It just didn’t occur. It didn’t matter. There were many other facets of the relationship that kept both of us too engaged to heed the age gap. Thankfully, we didn’t breach the socially acceptable half-your-age-plus-seven norm for romantic relationships. The conventional wisdom prescribes that, in marriage, women need to be younger than men in physical age. Why? They instinctively understand, for their age, the ways of the world better than men. I am happy that I chose, unwittingly though, a relatively larger dose of maturity.

She was married when I met her. A few years later, she ended her marriage. Our relationship certainly was the trigger but there were other, profounder reasons. The reasons which would have precipitated the action any which way, someday. Whatever the reason, separation is always challenging at multiple levels. Her situation was no different. She relocated back to Bengaluru. Reassured her family and friends on their concerns. Addressed morbid inquisitiveness of the peripheral others. Set up a home afresh, painstakingly. Changed her job. To dive a little deeper into life, she joined a spiritual organization. A strong woman, she restarted her life with a stronger resolve. Every time I ask myself if I was there by her side a hundred percent as she transitioned to a new phase in her life, I come up not with a very confident answer. I was there for her to draw strength from but, as I look back, I wasn’t there sufficiently.  The time progressed. We kept afloat. Amidst all highs and lows that characterized our situation, she conceived our child. We were happy. Yet we continued to carry, inexplicably though, our respective uncertainties as regards a life together. Here were two adults who loved each other, drew immensely from each other, shared joys & sorrows of an otherwise regular life and, above all, looked forward to each other’s company. Yet we hesitated to take the next logical step. The situation got better of us, and we decided not to bring our son into this world. Something snapped thereafter. We both could sense it as we started drifting apart. Our visits to each other became infrequent. We turned less communicative and less sharing. The physicality of distance too took its toll. Not before long, it was curtains. We both self-chose the pain.  

A few years later, as I was prepping to relocate to Kenya for work, I wanted to meet her, but she wasn’t keen. Silence distances and we had been silent for years. The only encouraging take-away from the brief conversation we had before I left was that both of us hadn’t moved on. A few long calls and a few months later she visited me at Nairobi. It felt good to have her around. We filled each other in on all that had happened during the period we were incommunicado. That’s when I realized her inner strength to brave out the harshest of difficulties in life, single-handedly. Without letting others get a whiff of her predicament. We ventilated ourselves. We cried. Picking up from where we had left, we discussed marriage again. Conceding that we had wasted quite a few years, we agreed that we needed to be with each other. We were married a few months later and she joined me at Nairobi.       

It was only yesterday that I was single, living in a world that limited my thoughts and actions to the ways of a single person. All of a sudden I was a family of four. The feeling was overwhelmingly new. With marriage, two daughters came in my life: one a fine, growing up lady and the other a bubbly in her teens. I had known them from before but this time in a new avatar with newer overtones. The younger one joined us. The elder one stayed put to continue with her pursuits. There is no gainsaying the fact that one needs to undergo the regimen of parenting, with attendant agonies & ecstasies, to earn children. Their birth. Their first cry. Their first wobbly walk. Their first sickness that worries you no end. Their first outing to school. Their teenage tantrums. Their wanting money to spend on things, away from the watchful eyes of the mother. Their predictable response of laying it on the generation-gap every time you picked holes in their ways. Their seldom-successful attempts to make you learn the challenging functionalities of a smartphone. Finding faults with their career choices. Creating ruckus over the hemline of their dresses. Trying to fob off their male friends. Over-worrying as they relocate for studies or job. I was denied the works as they arrived pretty late in my life. I couldn’t earn them. Once again, I come up not with a very confident answer to the question if I travelled an extra mile to make up for all the stages of parenting that I had missed. I lay part of the blame (something she too wouldn’t have disagreed with) at my wife’s doorstep too as she didn’t bring me up to speed on parenting grown-up children and handhold me to navigate the labyrinthine lanes of their world.      

The wise say that marriage requires adjustments at multiple levels. She too had to make many, for starters, in Nairobi. The country was new. People were new. Socializing was predominantly linked to the people and the occasions linked to me. An otherwise professionally well-engaged woman was without work as the work-permits were difficult to secure. I am sure she, at a philosophical level, missed her financial independence too. Then there were concerns typical to bringing up a daughter in a foreign land. Equally engaging were the thoughts for wellbeing of the other daughter back in the homeland. She would give me an inscrutable Monalisa-ic smile every time I teasingly asked her if our marriage was a good bargain given the straitjacket of a life she was living. Though she might not have much to write home about, at a profounder level, I could sense, she was happy for things falling in place.  

After a stint of six years, I thought of a change of job. We discussed the two opportunities I had, one in another foreign land and the other back home. She favored return to India. Though she didn’t say it in many words, I could sense that she wanted a home for an anchor to bring permanence in life. A few months later, we found ourselves in India. She got into the academics. I, into the corporate world. We set up a home and started getting into the groove, slowly. 

Everything was hunky-dory. But why was there always a worry lurking in the background. A shapeless, constant worry that carried unfounded apprehensions of ripples in the silent waters. In our context, there could have been two plausible explanations. One, not the actual insufficiency but the fear of insufficiency of ways to feed the soul of our relationship. The other, my unenviable habit of visiting the past askance, knowing fully well that the answers were not of any consequence. Having achieved the physicality of togetherness, the other dimensions were lost on me. I mistook living together as an end in itself rather than means to a bigger end. Whilst irregularly participating in larger issues, I was unheedful of smaller, simpler ones. It was left entirely to her to manage our personal world. By letting her be, I thought, I was ceding her the proverbial space. That’s what I thought, not her. Little did I realize that the situation was gradually overwhelming her. Her work environment engaged her bandwidth majorly. I too was heavily into my job and, later, my own venture. Together-time was lost in the bargain. Oblivious of the reality, I thought that a regular life was exactly the same as we were living. But she knew whatever was happening to us wasn’t what we had hoped for. Today I am reminded of Victor Hugo who had observed that “when a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes”. One day she exited my world. Another day, she exited the world to meet her maker. I miss her. As they say, the song has ended but the melody lingers on.  She was a good woman.