ALL MARRIAGES ARE MADE IN HEAVEN BUT SOME ARE DELAYED ON EARTH:
WE ENDEAVOUR TO HASTEN THEM ALL.
So read the billing at Renuka Marriage Bureau.
Rushing to Venu, Priya reread the same.
‘Oh, how fortuitous!’ she thought excitedly as she walked up to her car. ‘So, I could wed him now. Going by his photograph, he looks handsomer than ever; if anything, that streak of grey hair only lends him an aura of its own! It’s as well that he doesn’t dye his hair as most dandies would, more so while seeking a bride. Isn’t it true to his character; being truthful to himself, and to others as well. So, he’s divorced, which means that he was married; what was his wife like; could he have wed on the rebound? How long would’ve their marriage lasted; what could’ve gone wrong with their wedlock? By the way, have the roughs and toughs of his marital life affected his amiable disposition? May not have been, given the softness of his visage in that picture; oh, how I was tempted to flick it from that folder! But why did my sense of decency tie my hands when fate itself played foul with me; didn’t it make me reject his hand out of hand?’
Having reached her car, and sitting still at the steering, she continued to take the clock back in time, ‘How I used to like him in those days, but fate made me blind to his marital charms. But now he’s nearing forty-four and I’m touching thirty-nine; so what, as age has seemingly spared us both its ravages of time to afford us a hectic time to make up for our lost time. Maybe that’s why he looks at his handsomest best and my allure too is at its peak; wont’ all those ogling eyes tell that? Now that his picture has brought my loss to the fore, nearly two decades after our parting of ways, is it that fate has come to repent its thoughtless act? But is it going to redress its wrong doing? If so, when he sees me now, won’t it induce romantic impulses in him replacing his bitter memories of our parting? And for all that, ours could be one such marriage made in heaven that got delayed on earth. Maybe his divorce portends that. But still, given his past hurt and my present proclivities, would he like to own me? Well, I would know that soon enough, won’t I? But come what may, I won’t lose him this time for I can’t bear his loss anymore.’
Having resolved thus, she started her car to steer it to her newfound destination. In time, as the address led her to a middle-class setting, parking her car by the roadside, she rushed to Venu’s first-floor flat only to hold herself at the threshold. Soon though, as the doorbell couldn’t clear the hurdle, seeing the irony of it all, she went back to the car to continue her wait.
‘Would he be able to recognize me at all?’ she thought as his fortuitous absence made her lose the ecstatic momentum his memory had generated. ‘Surely, he would’ve pushed me out of his memory; if not for anything but for peace of mind. Moreover, twenty-years are too many for any to nurse an unrequited love. But once I announce myself, how would he react to my visit? Maybe for old time’s sake, he won’t turn me away straight away but surely he may not warm up to me, why should he? In that case, what could be the outcome of our cold encounter? Won’t he try to get even with me if I were to propose? Won’t hurt egos tend to go wayward in weird ways? Haven’t I seen that happen with Rekha’s hubby? So I should not let his temptation to score over me ruin the opportunity that life has at last presented to us. It makes sense to soften his hurt and win his trust to bring him around. But what if he tries to dismiss me at the doorstep itself? Well, he would know I’m no pushover of a gatecrasher.’
Checking the time, when she looked into the rear mirror, she saw a motorbike zooming near, and as it passed her by, turning her gaze through the windscreen, she saw the helmeted rider steer it through the compound gate. Sensing that it was Venu, she readily got down from the car to catch up with him but as her common sense cautioned her to allow him time to refresh, she got back into her car to wait for a while.
Soon though, as her eagerness got the better of her patience, with her heart in her mouth, she set out for a date with her destiny; but having reached the threshold, unable to decide about the period of a decent wait to cross it, she stood rooted there for long. At last, though driven by an irresistible desire for his espial, yet she knocked at the door tentatively but as Venu opened it immediately, she lost her way with the words that she had been rehearsing relentlessly.
However, seeing his face acquire that look, which the first look at a desirable woman induces in man, she readied her eyes to discern the nuances in his demeanor even as hers followed suit as an enamored female of a male. Soon, seeing the evolving signals of recall inevitably progress into signs of surprise, she presented him her smile dimples.
“What a surprise,” he said excitedly.
“Your face tells,” she said coyly.
“Come on in,” he said wide opening the door.
“But I seek a customary entry?” she said standing still.
“I don’t get you,” he said confusedly.
“Can’t wait till you get it,” she said flirtingly and stepped in.
“You haven’t changed much,” he said closing the door behind them.
“Your eyes said that much,” she said coquettishly.
“May know I’m wiser to your teases,” he said smilingly.
“I was afraid you might’ve forgotten me,” she said sitting in a sofa.
Then the doorbell rang as if to afford him an interlude to respond to her gambit.
‘He hasn’t taken my name as yet,’ she thought following him with her eyes to the front door. ‘Is he buying time with generalities to try to place me? Maybe his desiring look is more to do with my allure than with his recollection of me. But still, isn’t it good enough for my mission?’
Greeted by a salesman of doormats, Venu was not irritated for once, and having seen him off, he tried to come to grips with the sudden development.
‘What a bolt from the blue?” he tried to figure out his situation. ‘But how on earth she has managed to find me out, and for what purpose? What am I to make out of her peculiar overtures now? Is it her courtesy call after that discourteous send off? Or has she come to take my material stock to revalidate her rebuff then? If so, seeing my setting, won’t she feel vindicated? Why won’t that make a day for me for not giving her a cause for regret? Surely she has realized that I’m bowled by her charms, but how my enamored eyes could’ve hidden the urge her allure surged in me. What a sextraordinary thirty-nine she has turned into now! Whatever, I shouldn’t make a fool of myself yet again; I should see her off before my weakness for her grips me all again.’
“Sorry for coming in the way of your guest,” she said smilingly as he rejoined her.
“Never mind, it’s a trespasser,” he said sitting in the nearby sofa.
“Like me I suppose,” she said feigning to move closer to him.
“What do you mean by that?” he said unable to suppress his mirth.
“You haven’t taken my name as yet,” she said heartily.
“I felt it could embarrass you in my pronunciation,” he said dryly.
“Go ahead, and let me see,” she said coquettishly.
“Priya,” he said in spite of himself.
“I love it, don’t you see that?” she said coyly.
He merely looked at her for a clue to her flirtations.
“Glad you haven’t forgotten me,” she said tentatively.
“I forgot you in the sense that I hardly think about you,” he said unassumingly.
“No faulting you for that,” she said melancholically.
“I’m sure, it wouldn’t have been any different with you,” he said nonchalantly.
“Are you still bitter with me?” she said taking his hand.
While the sensuality of her touch raised the pitch of his flesh, the sensitivity of it insensibly induced empathy in his despondent heart.
“I’m sorry if I’ve sounded so,” he said pressing her hand.
“I know, you’ve every right to feel jilted by me,” she said still holding his hand.
“I was sad for losing you but never felt ditched by you,” he said withdrawing his hand, as if recalling his resolve.
“Don’t tell me that?” she said as much in surprise as in relief.
“You should believe me,” he said.
“I know you don’t lie, so do I,” she said taking back his hand.
“I know that but how do you do now?” he said letting her hold his hand.
“You would know that by and by,” she said mirthfully.
“There could be many threads for us to pick up,” he said in spite of himself.
“But two would do to twain it,” she said tantalizingly.
Beset by doubts all again, unable to enthuse himself, he withdrew his hand.
“Since I’ve taken the lead, I’ve the first right to gather,” she said regardless.
“It’s the same one-upmanship,” he said resignedly.
“So be it,” she said moving closer to him.
“First let me prepare some coffee for us,” he said getting up.
“May I steal the pleasure of it,” she said following him into the kitchen.
Soon, watching the fumes of the coffee decoction she was preparing, he envisioned the similitude of his evaporated marital dreams with her. But equally, as her loving looks and affectionate manner began dissolving his reservations about her, he found himself genuinely warming up to her.
“I never hoped to see you again,” he said taking her hand.
“Sometimes I thought I could,” she said pressing his hand as if demonstrate the reality.
“But what for,” he said.
“That’s for the end,” she said smilingly handing him a cup of coffee with a covetous look that surged his urge.
Then, sipping their coffee without a word, they stared at each other in turns, and having drunk to the dregs, they returned into the drawing room to continue their tête-à-tête.
“I’m all ears now,” she said as they settled in the sofa together.
“If you recall, we first met when I was a in the engineering final year and you, still in the intermediate,” he began his recap, “It didn’t take me long to realize that I was madly in love with you and that your feeling was no more than liking for me. So to say, that enabled me to grasp the nuances of liking and loving – to like is to savor someone’s presence and love is but misery of someone’s absence. Whatever, I nursed our marital hopes as there was no caste hurdle to cross and a status barrier to break for my love. So, wanting to propose to you after your graduation and to be nearer to you till then, after I got my degree, I took up a job in a small-scale unit in your town. Naturally I didn’t have a second thought about giving up some lucrative offers from elsewhere that would’ve afforded a head start to my career,”
“Sorry for being a spoiler in more ways than one, but why didn’t you tell me about it then?” she said grasping his hand as if to convey her pain through her touch as well.
“I didn’t want you to see that as my sacrifice,” he said reminiscently. “Moreover, seeing that your liking was yet to crystallize itself into love, maybe I was afraid that you may even goad me to go my career way. That way, you can say that it was all owing to the selfishness of my love. Whatever, I took you for granted and waited for your graduation to propose to you; so, when you declined my hand, I was as much shattered as surprised. But in the hindsight, we both were still raw then; you were barely nineteen to my nearly twenty-four.”
“So, you felt that I led you up the garden path,” she said ruefully.
“To be honest, that thought never crossed my mind,” he said pressing her hand. “Even otherwise, I always believed that it’s unfair to dub one’s genuine change of heart in the course of courting as jilting. I did realize that the closeness of courtship could expose the chinks in the armors of the enamored, giving rise to second thoughts in either, or both about the tenability of their wedlock. So, your reluctance to accept my proposal made me wonder what it was in me that made an unassuming girl like you think that my hand was not made of the right marital material for you to hold onto. Believe me; it’s no more and no less.”
“Though it’s no excuse,” she said apologetically, having been affected by his magnanimity. “I was too young to have either the foresight or the hindsight of life. What’s worse, I was in an impressionable age then, and as my life would have it, shortly before you proposed, I became friendly with Sudha, who came from an affluent family. As we readily took to each other, I began spending more of my time in their bungalow, which afforded me a first-hand experience of luxurious living. So, enamored of that life-style, I insensibly started craving for the same, and what’s worse, I came to see our middle-class life as wasteful existence. That’s how I came to raise my marital bar that was beyond even my immense liking for you to clear. Moreover, your contended visage viewed from my ambitious prism seemed too pale for my coveting.”
“Had you opened your mind then, my brain would’ve been spared of so much racking,” he said reminiscently.
“I thought why rub salt into the wound,” she said nostalgically.
“Maybe it’s a good turn from you as otherwise my monetary outlook could’ve got buggered in that nascent stage of my life,” he said philosophically. “Anyway, I hope you’ve got what you wanted.”
“Yes and no, and we’ll come to that later; but tell me what happened with you later,” she said exhibiting an uncanny urgency in her tone.
“After having lost you, it made no sense for me to stick around there,” he picked up the threads of his life all gain. “So, I readily moved over here but it took me quite a while to put all that behind me. But as that only brought the vexations of my bachelorhood to the fore, I let my parents look for my prospective bride. I told you that I was born very late into their marriage and so ever since I got employed, they were keen to marry me off, more so my father, who, by then, was fast nearing his retirement age. I may say in a lighter vein that besides his paternal concern for me, there was a middleclass mindset at work as well for one’s retirement would adversely impact the quantity as well as the quality of the wedding gifts. That is apart from the bargain prices for the related goods and services one’s proportionate position ensues. So, I readied myself to ascend the altar with my dream bride to supplant the desired one but the dynamics of arranged alliances kept me in the limbo for far too long to my material discomfort.”
He paused for a while as if to come to grips with the impediments in the way of timely marriages.
“To start with, notwithstanding our social inconsequentiality, my father was proud of his pedigree and so was averse to devaluing its progeny by default of an inferior nuptial,” he said nostalgically. “Besides, he was very status conscious, never mind he was but a petty government servant, oh, what vanity! But worst of all, he was a staunch believer in matching the horoscopes of the prospective couple to foresee whether it’s going to be a smooth sailing or the rough weather in their marital waters. Why single him out as that has become an article of faith of one and all, and the hitch is that if the groom’s astrologer predicts a batting wicket, the bride’s jyotishi lays a wet pitch for the same match. As if these impediments are not enough, there are peculiar community constraints and pecuniary family restraints to reckon with that is besides the whims of the bachelors and the fancies of the maidens. And the net outcome of all these human fads and foibles is that weddings tend to remain nonstarters for everyone’s discomfiture.”
“Do you believe in astrological predictions?” she said.
“Least of all matching horoscopes for mismatches,” he said. “If not a fraud, certainly it’s a farce as my own case proves. If the planetary configuration in the seventh house indicates one’s marital course, then astrologically speaking, he or she would only wed the one who would take him or her, on that predetermined path, which means one’s fate ensures that one willy-nilly shuns those not conducing one’s marital destiny and likewise gets slighted by such for the same reason. So, of what avail are these futile astrological exercises proving to be inimical to timely weddings.”
“May I contribute my bit to your philosophical astrology?” she said in all admiration.
“But before that,” he said, “I may say that instead, it would make sense if the psychic profiles of the prospective brides and grooms are sought to be matched for mental compatibility. Say, other persona specifics being more or less the same, two misers form a better wedlock than say, a miser and a moderate. So, we need psychoanalysts and not astrologers for matrimonial advice but still even if one believes that his future is cast in his horoscope, then he should be able to see the irrelevance of these misleading matching exercises. This reminds me of a funny remark about our peculiar penchant to simultaneously pray to a variety of gods and goddesses, which only means that we don’t believe in the power of any of them to fulfill our desires.”
“Some food for thought though,” she said smilingly.
“Over to your examined life,” he said inquisitively.
“Won’t the broken engagements and nays that prelude wedding vows prove that destiny too is prone for second thoughts?” she said meaningfully.
“Maybe that’s destiny’s own course correction,” he said wondering about the import of the moment. “While the combination of idiocies put my wedding on hold, my father’s retirement further impaired my aura in the wedding arena. By then, the dwindled number of matchable brides came to see their would-be in-laws as some sort of a marital overburden they would rather do without. No faulting the nucleus family’s free stirrings as the trappings of the joint family could indeed be oppressive but at the same time, one shouldn’t lose sight of the moral pinning of life itself. If the in-laws were to remain hard nuts to crack, maybe, its fine for the wife to scoot as the burden shifts to her man to rein in his folks, but to per se object to their presence in her home itself, never mind their amiable nature, is socially alarming.”
“Sadly, life fails to balance itself, so it seems” she said melancholically.
“Maybe that’s true about individual life,” he said noticing her changed demeanor, “but when it comes to life as a whole, it has a way of balancing itself. Even as my eligibility as a groom was getting degraded by degrees, so as to make her a match for me, life had contrived to keep Chitra’s marital dreams on hold. She was the second girl in the line of marriage in that middle-class household that held her four younger brothers as well. Besides the meager dowries their father could place in their wedding platters, the elder one had only plain-looks to offer to the prospective grooms. So, as the first wedding was not in the offing and as custom too wouldn’t let Chitra’s glamour jump the marriage queue, the second ritual was not even on the family agenda. However, while her sister, lacking an employable qualification to uphold the family dignity in the office corridors, sat at home cursing her fate, Chitra had double graduated to become a lecturer in some women’s college. But still her frustrating wait for her nuptial night seemed unending.”
“That apart, what to say about our family custom of marrying the girl first that puts paid to her elder brother’s marriage?” she said.
“Like most things in life that too has two sides to it,” he began reasoning the age-old customs. “The wed girl first idea is a relic of the joint family system that’s on a different footing but the sisterly seniority level-fields the matrimonial ground for the not so well endowed elder ones; just the same, it’s unfair to the juniors as it tends to deny them what life has granted them. This reminds me of the lines in Benign Flame – ‘when maidens cross their mid-twenties, they find to their consternation that men whom nature meant for them by the logic of natural selection, were indeed bending towards the younger ones, tending them to fend for themselves as singles’. That apart, can parents ever ensure equal quality of life to all their children? Well they may enable them all obtain the same degree but would that ensure them the same career station in life? It’s no different on the matrimonial front. As all have to be on their own at some point of time, I think it’s better for the parents to let their children run their individual courses driven by their destinies.”
“Have you become a Socrates of sorts or what?” she said in all admiration.
“It’s not like that,” he said in all humility, “and simply put, life teaches us all through though we refuse to learn, but in my case, maybe, fate forced me to grasp its hardest lessons. So to say, nature devised food and sex not only to sustain life but also to make it joyous to the living and towards that end it endows the earth to cater to the former and contrives the sex ratio to ensure the latter. However, in nature’s scheme of things, and by the very character of their functions, food furnishes life from birth to death while sex, as it is a latecomer, makes an early exit albeit after an exhilarating run. So instead of lamenting on the lackings of life, prudence lies in making the best possible use of its limited sexual span, of course buttressed by one’s libido. Surely the elders, privy to this aspect of life, should advise the youths to pick up the low hanging sexual fruits to satiate themselves, as other wants of life can wait for their eventual fruition.”
“Oh, what lessons of life!” she said admiringly.
“Now I want to hear about your learnings,” he said.
“But our agreement is different, isn’t it?” she said smilingly.
“Why are you so adamant?” he said exhibiting his curiosity.
“Why read the last page of a mystery beforehand?” she said turning coquettish as if alluding to her intended ending of their current encounter.
“You always have a way to stump me,” he said reminiscently.
“But now the ball is in your hand, isn’t it?” she said half in jest.
“So to continue my tiresome tale,” he said in resumption, “at last, as if Chitra’s fate was fed up of the tortuous wait, it induced a widower to own her sister’s older hand. So with the decks to her marriage thus cleared, and the astrologers having concurred, soon she entered into my life to celebrate her thirtieth birthday as my wife, and that was ten years back. I plead guilty for revealing a woman’s age.”
“Pardoned, because it’s not mine,” she said smilingly and added endearingly. “You’re lighter than your forty-four.”
However, noticing that he checked his instinct to lend his voice for the admiration for her gorgeous looks that his face has been conveying to her, she presented him her guilt-filled visage, which only stirred his innate feelings for her.
“Priya,” he said, “let me picture the material arena into which I ushered her in from the altar so that you can have a true perspective of our marital life. You know neither money enamored me nor ambition courted me, but strangely my professional qualification became the bane of my career. My search for a proper job landed me in a state government undertaking that has since gone under; so no use taking its name now. Since I loved that job as a purchase officer, I exerted myself to excel at it, and my boss, for his part, was keen to see me making great strides on the career ladder. However, when he had all but set the stage for my crucial promotion, unfortunately for both of us, he was sidelined by the minister to bring in the sibling of a political bigwig as the departmental head. Somehow, the new arrival was averse to engineers in what he perceived as a commerce domain, and so he sat on my promotion as if he was on an indefinite sit in. The fact that I made a late start in the corporate world too didn’t help me to make it to the greener pastures that anyway my love for this place further restricted. So, with no progress on the marital as well as the career fronts, it may not be hard for you to picture my plight then.”
“What an irony that a superior education should yield inferior career returns and no wonder that company had gone under,” she said equally affected.
“Whatever, when my father came to know that my salary was no better than that of a bank clerk then, he wondered of what avail was his ordeal in financing my technical education, with hostel bills and all,” he said feeling sad for his disappointed dad. “Likewise, after an agonizing wait, marriage led an unwary Chitra into a failed career setting, and it showed, readily at that. Yet I couldn’t fault her as it was I who failed to deliver what my qualification had promised in her dream marital home. So, soon after she came into my life, she entreated me to refurbish this flat and refurnish it, and held that her earnings would lighten the debt burden. Though it was against my nature to live beyond our means, but still, against my better judgment, I went along with her to try to set the right marital tune in our home. Yet, setting her sights much beyond the monitory reach of our home, and thereby lamenting over its material lackings, she made us miss most of its marital offerings at that vantage station of our life. Oh, what a hell of a companion a sulking spouse doth make!”
“I can see it from your face,” she said pressing his hand.
“That being the case, what else I could do then than sharing my philosophy of life with her,” he said holding her hand. “But while the averments of the have-nots on the irrelevance of wealth lack credence, the hypocrisy of the well heeled on that count carries conviction in public perception, and that’s the irony. Yet, I tried to make her see that everyone’s life is a unique package of creature comforts and emotive kicks; the former displaying the standard of living and the latter defining the quality of life. If only the ethereal facets of the packages that have a bearing on the quality of life were also to be visible for public view, then possibly people would suffer less in material comparison for it would be apparent then that life gives with one hand and takes away with the other; what’s more, adverse times dent its bigger packages more than the smaller ones. So to say, I tried to make her see reason to make our life as amiable as was possible but to no avail.”
“Had I married you then, I’m sure my wooly head wouldn’t have let me fare any better than her,” she said and thought ‘so whatever happens happens for good.’
“Maybe, you know that better,” he said and paused as if to come to grips with the pain his recollections caused him, and she was gripped by guilt for being the cause of it all.
“So we dragged our marriage into the second year thus,” he resumed his woeful tale. “But even as our life became a farce, fate imparted an inimical twist to it. Latching onto my colleague’s jesting about the under-the-table worth of my purchase desk and my naivety in not realizing that, she began pressing me to become worldly-wise. Oh, the tricks she played to seduce me to graft our way to happiness would surely make a treatise on the subject. Yet, finding me unyielding, she first took to moral blackmail – though in a position to take her on joyrides in sedans, how unfair I was in reducing her into a pillion rider etc., etc. Since I remained stubborn even then, she took to sexual blackmail to heighten my frustration, but as that too didn’t bring about my surrender, she became unimaginably cantankerous that is to put it mildly.”
“In spite of it all, what gave you the strength to stick to your moral ground?” she said as much in surprise as in admiration.
“Like with nature so is the case with human nature, it has some invariable dimensions to it,” he philosophized. “It’s possible that my innate disregard for money enabled me to withstand that irresistible feminine pressure of an amorous woman that too in the prime of our life. But still, as captured in Jewel-less Crown, it’s the character of money to corrupt the ardent, tease the vacillating, and curse the indifferent, and curse it did.”
“Oh, how true it is,” she said in the flashback her own life.
“Finally, on the third wedding anniversary that symbolizes the flexibility of marital durability, she chose to roll the dice on its longevity. That day when she said that she would quit her job, her idea of idleness was a ruse to make me fall in line for shorn of her salary my budget would be in the topsy-turvy. She knew that deprived of her contribution, I would be really hard up to repay the loans I took to cater to her whims and fancies, and so she reckoned that I would fall in line as I won’t be able to make both ends meet with my income alone. Well, she thought that she called it right but still as I hedged my bets, she quit her job and what’s worse resorted to wasteful practices to further strain my finances.”
“Wonder how you could endure all that,” she said taking his arm and holding it endearingly.
“While my patience wore thinner, the threshold of her impatience too became lower,” he continued to recap his matrimonial predicaments, “and in the end, she threatened to sue me for divorce and her maintenance to boot. So to say, her threat of divorce made me only feel relieved for I always believed that it’s unfair for man to ditch a woman at any time, more so past her prime, when she would be most vulnerable to attract another mate. Maybe she wanted to make me realize that my uprightness at office wouldn’t let me square it up at home, and surely the prospect of providing for her maintenance out of my overstrained financial position unnerved me. But still I thought I’ve had enough of her and so didn?