She
thought she knew it was never going to work even before it started. Definitely
not the way one read in books. She was just playing along. After all she was
not the naïve sixteen year old anymore nor was she the young temptress of
twenty either. She was bloody twenty-eight and just two years away from
becoming a dinosaur of thirty, or so she thought. When her parents brought up
the idea of marrying the spectacled ape of a man, she simply nodded her head in
agreement. Well it was not as if she was dating someone or pining over a lost
love.
To
begin with, he was not a romantic; not the one who will bring her flowers or
small gifts just too see her smile. Big deal nor was her dad. (The only flowers her dad bought home where
the big bright yellow marigolds for aarati for god.)
He
never bothered to compliment her or admonish her. Bad and mediocre cooking
never elicited a reaction from him. An extremely well cooked meal would bring
about a smile and a humming of 70’s Hindi songs while he cleaned up the dishes.
There were so many things irritating about him. He was so laconic that sometimes
she felt she was talking to a wall. The fact that he never complained about anything
left her puzzled. ”Amma, does he think I have mind reading capabilities to
understand the thoughts running in his mind?”
She had complained to her mother in the early days of their marriage.
Her mother had simply smiled at her,” In time my child, you will learn that as
well.” and continued rubbing the fragrant oil onto her scalp. She felt even
more helpless with Amma’s cryptic advice; if Amma had no solution what was she going
to do.
Along
the way, she did love him for those small little things he did. She was not
quite sure if it was love or his extreme sense of duty which made him do things
without so much as ever mutter under his
breath. He did not complain about waking up umpteen times to rock their boy
back to sleep or changing nappies every half hour. When she had broken her leg,
falling off the “chandrakaran maavu”*
amidst plucking ripe mangoes to cook his favorite “mambazha pullisherry”**, he had carried on as if nothing of
consequence had happened. He woke up early, cooked her food, took care of the kids,
and went to office for the entire six weeks her legs hung in a plaster without
even letting out an unpleasant sigh. His tenacity surprised her to no end.
After all, she was the free radical between them, extremely volatile and prone
to emotional explosions.
Today
years after the sacred thread bound them; the arrival of children and grand
children, her old man sits next to her hospital bed holding a bunch of flowers
with a “Get well Soon Love” card stuck on top of it, his face red with embarrassment."
”Ee
kuttyolu.Enikku ethonnum nishchyilla ennu Saro-nu ariyallo.” He says looking at
everything except me.
“These kids; you know
I have no clue of any of these things, don’t you Saro?”
So
it’s them, my grandchildren, who has made him carry around these flowers like a
lovesick sixteen year old. I want to
laugh and cry. He has actually called me Saro short for Sarojini. There is
something I feel inside me, something like a flutter. At sixty I cannot call it
a butterfly in my stomach, can I? He puts those flowers near my bed stand and
quietly sits down near the window to read the newspaper.
I
look at him, my eyes moist. As my mother had said long back, I had mastered
reading him. I could read his mind from the arch of his brows, the movement of
his lips and the gait of his body. Eventually I just had to look at him and his
thoughts would appear in front of me as though written on a sheet of paper in
his neat handwriting.
I
have never regretted the flower or gifts he did not give me because somewhere
at some moment or may be over a course of time we had fallen into a rhythm. We
had tuned into each other like a pair of walkie-talkies, picking up signals even
before they were send. I would not call it love and dismiss it as fragile
emotion. Because it is much more than love, it is a complex emotion made of
trust, faith, patience, and a generous sprinkle of love. So what if he does not
mouth his feeling? I can, as kids these days say, always log in to his mind to
see what is happening there.
*-Chandrakaran
maavu is type of mango tree that bears these small sweet succulent mangoes. My
personal favorite.
**-Mamabazha
pulliserry is the bestest dish in world because it has Chandrakaran manga/mango
cooked in coconut gravy.
P:
S: This story was inspired by a short film Bastille, one of the eighteens films
part of the French anthology Paris Je t’aime (Paris
