My Olive Leaf

My best friend was getting married, to someone she barely knew, that too when she was only nineteen.

“You are kidding, right? Hey, is this Pankaj’s plan?” I said majestically, trying to prove that I wouldn’t be fooled by them (our college gang), at least not this time (the prank was too obvious”).

Our derivative teacher gave us a horrendous stare, indicating us to keep our mouths shut, and continued scribbling the Black Scholes formula on the board.

Silence.

She slipped a photograph into my register.

Awwww” two young mortals, immoderately decked up, were smiling at me. She flaunted a diamond-studded ring on her ring finger. I looked up to reconfirm, and she nodded in approval.

We pulled out of the class, to go to the canteen.

“Hey, it’s a very private affair. Don’t tell this to the gang right now. May be we can do that sometime after the official engagement. We have just had the roka ceremony for now ” She said.“ Yaa, fine”

The day she broke that news to me, I was flabbergasted, I really was. I couldn’t believe it, till I actually saw her taking her wedding feras, till I saw her (after four months) at our sixth semester exams with a dash of sindhoor on her hairline”.

I got a mail from her last night. She is coming down for Diwali, her first Diwali at her in-laws place.

I am not creating fiction to lead to what I want to write about. This is true. Ankita is in Richmond now, and she has been married for almost eight months today.

Eight months, and the past nineteen years. Many of the events of my past life have either been forgotten, or have lost their poignancy now. Pleasures, fantasias and pain, all look alike from the gap between the past and the present. Anks wedding is one such event in my life.

I never questioned her then, and I think I won’t be able to do that for the next ten years or so. But I questioned myself.. Would I marry the person, my family chose for me? at an age when I don’t even know the true meaning of being in a relationship like that.. or at any other age marry someone who is not of my choice?

Can I be in a relationship with someone, just because I was infatuated towards that person for some time, and entered into a commitment on that impulse..

Can two people be married forever and still not want to be out of it, after many many years..

Is there anything like soul mates? Two people being in perfect unison in spite of all their differences?

To the cannons of the greatest love in history, Tristan for Isolde, Romeo for Juliet, Anthony for Cleopatra.. .arises a quest” were they really in true love?

There is this old couple who stay three blocks away from where I live. I often meet them during my morning walks. They got married in their late fifties. Before they met, the two were trying to be happy in their own separate worlds. They had found solace in their solitude and instilled a belief that sharing their life with someone would distort that peace. That they can’t be happier than what they were. Till they met and realized what they were missing. “ Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be lonely, searching and lost”..’ he quotes from Bach.

Marriage is not a something which needs to be defined in a time frame.. girls to be married before twenty-five and guys thirty.. The ultimate deadline.. What crap. And this is what happened with my friend perhaps. Being a baniya, she was brought up with that mindset, and she accepted it. I pray she never reads this.

You marry when you think you have found the right person to share your life with. And why should you compromise on that right person? We are skeptical about being able to find that one person, and in that despair we try to settle for less. We are forced to haste things and be with someone we realize we were never meant to be with. And then we see, people walking out, because they realize that incompatibility can never be matched. Because it is not easy to strike compatibility with everyone.

Then one fine day, we read about falling marriages. Of the likes of Pooja Bedi saying, that marriage is not a permanent institution. That there is nothing like perfect communion, that its all a mirage which falls apart when you move closer and closer towards it. That people always fall out of love.

Is it?

And there are those two people involved. One is like a hydrogen balloon, dying to go up, and the other like a stone to which it is tied, pulling it down. And then, they go nowhere.

I don’t know, if there are people who can be called Soul Mates. I have not come across such couples, so far. But then I have not been here for very long, I have not seen much of this world. But I know, they exist. They might not be able to find each other, but yaa they do exist.

This is not romantic idealism. I am not mixing dreams with reality, the penultimate temptation of our lives. All I am saying is that, yes there is someone like us( or may be a few), on this Planet Earth, and age is no bar for not trying to find that one person.

And imagine if you find that one person. A person whom you love with the same intensity as you love him. A person whom you love more everyday as time passes. A person with whom you can be your truest self, and yet be loved without having to pretend to be your best. A person who makes you secure enough to drop your defenses. A person who takes out the best in you and you in him .A person whose foundation, deepest desires, and sense of direction, are same as yours. I am not saying that those two people would be replicas of each other. They might have several differences, might disagree on a lot of things. But then, their need to grow, learn and expand together, surpasses all those trivialities. That come what may, the “us” between them doesn’t separate. “ is this possible?

And how much I wish I could tell this to Ankita. I wanted to broach this, but her happiness restrained me from doing that.

”Isha, I couldn’t have been more happier. I am so much in love.’ She says in all her mails. May be, in a year or two I’ll become a MASSI. She MOM. And Rohit, DADA. One tiny tweetie pulling my hair with his little hands and saying, Maaasssiii...again and again till he doesn’t become a pro at pronouncing those words. Two years or five, I can’t imagine seeing that little toddler making my Anks clean his wee shit and change his diapers. And that besides, I can’t imagine that one of these days, our Ank,, the only one to be permanently placed at College, would be bossed around by a nerd much more nerdier than her.