by Shobhaa De
What was wrong with my marriage? What had gone wrong? Now that there is some distance, I suppose I can hazard a pretty accurate guess. My marriage went sour because I’d married the wrong man for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. My husband was not a villain. He was just an average Indian husband—unexciting, uninspiring, untutored. Why he did marry me, I shall never know. I asked him often enough and he always laughed it off. He wasn’t one for introspection or for rocking the boat. Not for him the agony of questioning relationships—any relationship. Unless things went radically wrong he preferred to let things be. He reminded me of a loyal cocker spaniel when we first met, and as we grew older, the canine resemblance became startling. Maybe I accepted him and accepted the marriage, sans passion, sans anything, because it suited me. I didn’t have to exert myself. I didn’t have to prove anything. He seemed grateful enough for my presence. He wasn’t looking for any stimulation, either intellectually or emotionally. And I could have done a lot worse—like Anjali. My friends were stuck with similar husbands. I guess that made us all feel better. We often discussed them and agreed what bores the lot of them were. In a way it was sad that there was no fight in us any longer. We were an exhausted generation of wives with no dreams left. Like our mothers before us, despite the pretensions of our unmarried youth, we concentrated on the lives of our growing children (for the most part, that was one thing I was determined not to do, have children, and thankfully, here the husband concurred).We lived through them, a vicarious, precarious existence. We clung on to the status quo of being “Shrimati so and so,” and we refused to take risks. As for the husbands, they came into the picture only in a crisis—a death in the family, a kitchen accident or something that required a man’s intervention. Sometimes I felt amused by my marriage and what I had allowed it to become. And as all of us in our little women’s club agreed it wasn’t the husbands who were the real villains. Poor fools—they were simple and uncomplicated and, therefore, happy creatures. It was us with our denuded anger who were miserable. But how could we communicate anything at all to men who perpetually sat reading the business pages of The Times of India while concentratedly picking their noses?
Surprisingly the husband’s business, after the initial setbacks it received because of his amateurish enthusiasm, began to revive. His father had died shortly after we were married and all the vodka-tonics he had poured into his contacts seemed to be finally turning to gold. Slowly he rose in the Bombay business community’s pecking order until there came a time when he was Abe’s equal and more.
And even though Anjali was no longer married to Abe, this elevation in our status really got to her. She couldn’t play the grand patroness, which meant that she couldn’t play the condescending queen convincingly. I would sincerely have preferred her to go on doing just that. I felt equally uncomfortable in my new-found role in society. I still didn’t have satiny nails. Nor did I go to the hairdressers for a weekly oil massage and I still wore local bras and sprayed on English Lavender instead of French perfume. I was in no way close to becoming Anjali, yet I could sense her unease. Sometimes she’d gush over me in an exaggerated manner. “How divine you look, darling. Those must be from Gazdar’s,” she’d say, fingering my earrings. That would be followed by, “Do get a decent tailor, sweetie, your bra strap is showing.” This was to put me in my place and remind me that I may have married money, but I still had to get the details right. Occasionally, she’d show up at home and take an inventory. “Show me everything, darling. What have you bought since I last came here.” I would have liked her to go take a powder but a mixture of the old awe and a sense of ennui usually combined to keep me calm. I’d show her my new acquisitions and wait for her verdict. And she would play grande dame to perfection.
We clung on for years and years to this pantomime, much after I had outstripped her in every way and seen through all her acts.There was something fragile and precious about her delusions. I didn’t have the heart to hold up a mirror and ask her to study her reflection. She was not aging well. Of course, she was still a striking woman. But now the horsiness had become more pronounced and the lines around her eyes and mouth were harsher, deeper. She’d stare at me critically and say, “Hey! Your hair is all wrong, woman. Why don’t you get a proper cut? There’s this wonderful Italian guy in town—by appointment only. He’s trained at Vidal’s and he’s a real doll! I could fix him up for you.” I didn’t have it in me to tell her that my hair had been fixed by the divine Angelo and if it looked a mess to her—she obviously didn’t know better!
She couldn’t stand my husband and made no bones about it. “Isn’t he a little crass, darling? I mean, what do you two do in bed?” That was a good question. I often asked myself the same. Our love-making (if I could call it that) was a listless affair. I would tell my husband, in the days when we still had something going between us, that he generally felt like sex only on the days he skipped his regular workout at the health club. Making love was losing calories to him. I saw it as nothing more than a vague habit. We didn’t even bother to remove our clothes. “Most Indians don’t, darling,” Anjali reminded me, to rub in the view that we were nothing more than the average, native couple. My husband notwithstanding, sex, I’d discovered, rated very low in my life. I could’ve done without it forever.
We’d lie there in the bedroom with the dull walls reading our respective magazines. He with The Economist and I with a film rag. If there was absolutely nothing better to do and we ran out of magazines, he’d turn to me and nudge. “Wife—how about it?” Neither the words nor the tone did anything to allay the disgust I usually felt. But it was simpler to just get on with the damn thing and have it over and done with as fast as possible. I would lie there staring at the ceiling as he pounded away. Or sometimes I’d mentally review the day’s accounts. I can never remember my thoughts being anything other than unedifying.
What applied to sex applied to the marriage and I soon realized Mother had been right when, talking to me on the eve of the wedding, she’d said, “Marriage is nothing to get excited or worried about. It’s just something to get used to.”
Most of the women I knew concurred with this viewpoint. We treated marriage like a skin allergy—an irritant all right, but not something that would totally incapacitate us.We had our own secret lives—and by that I do not mean clandestine affairs. But these were our private worlds, inaccessible to the men we had married. I could spend hours in this world, even when the husband was around talking to me. There was a special thrill in switching off and pretending to be there listening while being lost in a universe created by me, for myself.
Despite this escape hatch, I still dreamed, as I know some of my friends did, of the perfect marriage. The marriage that was as far removed from the uninspiring one I was in as the stars were from us. A marriage full of laughter and conversation. One in which the two of us were perfectly in tune. Speaking the same language, thinking the same thoughts, enjoying the same things. It wasn’t that I never tried, but there was no question that my husband and I inhabited different planets.
“So what if he has never heard of Somerset Maugham?” my sisters said once (this was about the time I had begun to make books my refuge). “At least, he’s good to you.” Good to me? Why should he have been anything else? I wasn’t a wicked wife (except in my thoughts). I conformed. I went along with his social cum business entertaining, his house was neat and clean, and he had interesting food on the table. I thought I was doing my bit and paying for my keep. If anyone was shortchanged, I would have thought, it was me.
“Don’t be ridiculous, darling,” Anjali scolded one day (she was playing her mother patroness role). “Look at it this way—he was quite a catch.You lead a very comfortable life. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t beat you.You should consider yourself very lucky. Now, don’t go and ruin it all with your funny expectations. If you want to go to Istanbul (this had come up when my husband and I were watching, of all things, a sphagetti western shot in Turkey) or anywhere els
e—ask him nicely.” So even though the time I’d suggested a holiday in Istanbul he’d looked at me as though I was crazy, I decided to try again. And I was extra nice this time. I reeled off a list of names of places that we should go to—Morocco, Tangiers, China, and he came up with one of the few memorable lines of the marriage. “We are not in the movies,” he said, “and I’m not Humphrey Bogart.We’ll go to London like everyone else.” And that was that. There was no meeting ground on the smallest of things. “Why don’t we go to the market today, look for some vegetables, I saw some great tomatoes from the car.” “What for? We’ve got servants to do that for us,” he’d say and switch on the VCR.
All the husbands of my friends more or less fell into this pattern. They were not evil men, but what they did to our lives went beyond evil.We were reduced to being marginal people. Everything that mattered to us was trivialized. The message was “You don’t really count, except in the context of my priorities.” It was taken for granted that our needs were secondary to theirs. And that in some way we ought to be grateful for having a roof over our heads and four square meals a day. A friend bitterly recalled how her husband would taunt her during their frequent fights, “What did you marry me for? All you were looking for was a meal ticket.” And here was this woman, a qualified surgeon, feeling humiliated and demoralized enough to actually half believe what he was saying. “I can’t help it. He brainwashes me constantly. I’m made to feel obliged and in debt. It’s awful, but even my insistence on working and contributing to the running expenses of the house has become a battleground. I don’t know what to do—either way I’m stuck.”
Anjali would sum it up with all the years of experience behind her. “Men just feel terribly threatened by self-sufficient women. They prefer girls like me—dependent dolls.We make them feel like heroes and saviors. You should try it—see how much more you’ll be able to get out of him that way.” Maybe she was right. But it was not for me. In time, in my own way I worked out a formula that ensured peace if not bliss. I left him alone and I hoped he’d leave me alone. I felt like an indifferent boarder in the house, going through the motions of housekeeping and playing wife but the resentment and rebellion remained just under the surface, ready to break out at the smallest provocation.
It was at one of those utterly boring cocktail parties where one goes to meet the “right people” that a wonderful voice said to me, “You look as if you are about to implode.” At that point, I didn’t know what the word meant—but it sounded very impressive. I turned around to look into a pair of gentle gray-green eyes behind large spectacle frames. He offered me a drink which I declined. “Offer me even ten minutes of real conversation instead,” I wanted to scream. We talked, but I was on my guard. It was such a problem finding a man who I could speak to without having to worry about the message being misread. All I wanted at that point was to meet someone mature, sensitive, intelligent, funny and sympathetic. To my great relief he turned out to be all that. It was a friendship that grew over the months at an unhurried pace.We would speak to each other over the phone and we’d meet from time to time at the idiotic parties that were a staple of Bombay’s high life. It remained a formal relationship with well-defined rules. He never asked about my marriage and I never asked about his. I suspected we were in similar situations. His wife was not a vamp—she seemed a studious, sincere, steady sort of woman, who probably regarded marriage as a duty she had to discharge honorably. He was different. And we were similar. But even my overwhelming thankfulness at having met him never influenced my perspectives. As Anjali would’ve said, “He wasn’t husband material.” And that made me realize that I wasn’t wife material. We were both solitary creatures with solitary dreams who simply weren’t cut out for domesticity with all its trappings. That was the truth at one level. At another we were both just chicken. I’m sure about that or we would almost certainly have had an affair.
The gossip circuit spun its own tales (“He likes to screw, sure he does, but only mentally”) but I preferred my version. Whatever the truth, in retrospect, I was glad I didn’t go all the way (my middle-class background still ruled all my actions at the time and I don’t believe I could have coped with the guilt) and that he didn’t suggest it.
What we did do was find comfort in each other’s loneliness. I would talk to him endlessly about the things my husband found “womanish” and “corny.” I would discuss the trips I would never make and the drinks I’d never drink (“Red sails in the sunset?” Why not?). He was also a handy reference library. I respected his scholarship and his literary passions. “Let us go then, you and I, while the evening stretches across the sky,” he’d say by way of an invitation he knew I wouldn’t take up. (I didn’t recognize the poem either!) He would recommend books, stray bits of poetry, an article in the NewYorker, a film he’d enjoyed. I discoveredYeats and Kurosawa,Yevteshenko and Maria Callas. Ideas and words swirled around in my head. All sorts of exciting new dimensions opened up mentally and my scattered reading habits began to come together. I couldn’t wait to talk to him and share the previous day’s discoveries. Apart from all this cerebral stuff, we found comfort in talking about small things.There was just no area of my life that didn’t interest him. And the other way around. He had an old, ailing aunt living in his home who he was dearly fond of. Soon after we met, he discovered that she had a gangrenous big toe that needed to be amputated. It pained him deeply to subject the old woman to that operation. And I shared his pain, not because I had any feelings for her—but because it mattered so much to him.There was a certain resonance in our reactions. I could call and crib that the tailor had let me down or that my mother-in-law had behaved like a perfect bitch. I could tell him that I was suffering the premenstrual blues. Or that I was worried about my sister’s marriage (my older one, who was a doctor now—her marriage had been arranged to a London-based engineer). When he decided, abruptly and unreasonably it seemed to me, to go away and settle in a distant town, I cried. Would I never really live, I thought, then chided myself and tried to be happy for him.
We went to his farewell party. His wife looked at me as if she knew. Maybe she did. It was a gathering of all the creative, arty brains in the city.The ad people, the documentary guys, the art-film set, painters, journalists, models and others on the fringes of what was a pretty rarefied world. He started to play the piano while his wife surveyed me thoughtfully. My husband may have noticed the crosscurrents, but like everything else in his life, he pretended he hadn’t sensed a thing.
I saw my New York flame smoking a bidi in one corner, chatting up the latest “face” in town. And then Si, Anjali’s friend, lately back in town, made her entrance, accompanied by a gay arts and crafts guy from Delhi. They certainly were the most striking couple at the gathering. He looked like a Gupta period temple deity, while she wore the ethnic tramp look. By which I mean she had on a bright, mirrored ghagra with an apology of a choli—backless and virtually frontless. A flimsy chiffon scarf served as a dupatta. This she played around with coquettishly, tying herself to her gay friend’s wrist with it at one point. I noticed an arty actor from the South, kissing the jeweled toes of a socialite. “Don’t worry—we are like brothers,” he kept repeating as he begged the woman to take him home. It was that sort of a party. At some point in the festivities an ad man I disliked heartily positioned himself behind the bar and demanded a kiss from every woman before handing her a refill. Most of them obliged willingly, and soon his bald head was smeared with lipstick marks. The conversation was of course vintage pseudo-artspeak. “In” references and tart comments. I looked at the phone over which we had spoken so many times and felt sad that soon there would be no one to talk to. No one to “educate” me on Bonjour Tristesse and Françhise Sagan. I looked at him with “his crowd,” “his guests” and knew whatever we might have shared I could never have been a part of that world. Not really. He moved amongst them with rehearsed ease, a joke here, a quip there, a drink for someone, a hug for another. He was not the same person who
discussed Turgenev and Camus, cannelloni and caviar . . . or the color of my eyes. This man was a charming stranger who squeezed his wife’s arm each time he passed her and said “naughty girl” to a fierce media controller in granny glasses.
As the evening progressed, I caught myself at one point wondering about who was having it off with whom in that room. It used to be said that a party wasn’t successful till at least two marriages broke up during the evening.Which two? It was interesting to intercept sly glances and catch the odd crosscurrent. But all the while that sadness I felt kept its hold on me. My friend began to resemble a beached whale—a huge, clumsy, helpless creature on a filthy beach. Was this the environment I was doomed to spend a lifetime in? Toward the end of the evening my friend went and put on a record of Brazilian tangos. He then walked up to me with a purposeful look in his eyes and, without asking, swept me into his arms and onto the floor.