Seven Shades of Grey (13 page)

Now here are my views where I differ with you due to circumstances - I refer to a para in your mail that begins ‘I am not negating the role of a woman...’

Had it been us living in a city like Bombay where traveling time is too much, I would have preferred to remain as a housewife. Till I met Sanjay, I also had the usual dream about my life as all girls of that age do - to get married, have family and live happily. When I met Sanjay, and we decided to marry, his first and last condition for his wife was that she should be a working woman. That time I didn’t know what problems being a working woman would entail. He knew that very well even at that age because his mother was a principal of a university and his sister was also working in the teaching line. With this condition, he was willing to give any kind of support to his wife to be a successful working woman. So I agreed to his condition. My mother was also a housewife as my father never wanted her to be working outside but he gave his daughters the freedom to decide about that on their own. Even then I only started working after 6 years of our marriage when our 2nd son was a year old.

Sanjay did give all kind of support to me for going ahead in my line. He has his own established business that he has built all by himself. So money was not the criteria behind this condition. (His view about this I will tell you some other time.) I started as an assistant to the chairman of this company 7 years ago. Gradually I was given an additional responsibility of overseas marketing and was promoted as a manager. Today I am working as an employee to my company and also have a deal with the Co working as an independent exporter. This was just impossible for me without Sanjay’s support. He does the traveling part for our exports and I do the entire follow up of it. This has become an expansion of his business and a milestone in my career. We had never thought we would be doing this kind of a deal with our Co but things were going smoothly and happening without any problems. So to quit for any reason from this would have not been a wise decision for us and the company as well.

Sanjay has helped me in every aspect to get me going ahead. In fact, he was happier than I was when I was promoted as a manager!

Though you have not commented about my being a working woman, this is just to brief you about our different views in this matter - yours are your own views and mine are due to circumstances as I have mentioned earlier.

Handling all these fronts, I have become a strong believer that THE QUALITY OF TIME IS MORE
IMPORTANT THAN THE QUANTITY OF TIME you spend at home. And you have given me a perfect idea how to go about it as far as Sanjay is concerned. Thanx.

Just to tell you ... you said when I am upset start counting numbers ... well we already have adopted one method. Our argument started with the Internet and will now only get resolved through the Internet. Yes, when we are upset we write mails to each other and get a reply by the evening, resolve it and then go to bed ... LOL ... Isn’t this also a better way?

I always felt I am one of the fortunate women who have a caring husband, a loving family and good friends around me. Today I can say I am one of the MOST fortunate ones to have got a friend and that is the one and the only one MY Vikram!

Love

Reshma

I read the email thrilled that things had worked out for them, happier still that their faith in each other had helped them resolve a silly dispute. But most of all I was happy that they believed in the love they possessed.

*

Even today, in this waiting room, alone, I can’t help but contrast the two, and yet how similar are Marilyn and Reshma: one from the West who fits into an Eastern mold and one from the East molded like the West. Appearances are consistently deceptive, perception trying hard to fit all and sundry into definable molds
- East and West, rich and poor, happy and sad, black and white - forgetting that in reality we are like the colors of a rainbow viewed in black and white; just Seven Shades of Grey.

8. Insanity - Dark Grey

To understand the definition of white, one has to understand that which is black; to know what light is, darkness has to be fathomed. A blind man knows just one color, black, knows nothing about light because he lives only in darkness.

My temporary prison sentence has yet to be completed. Try as I may, my mind still wanders to that part of my life when I had gained it all and then lost it all. I have tried desperately to block it out of my mind, unsuccessful at times. The news of Dolly’s pregnancy, the astonishment, the subsequent doctor visits and her growing stomach had ensured that my mind was gainfully employed, but this solitude brings it all back. It is MAA’s will I guess; everything that ever happened is her will. I have to confront insanity just one last time, to exorcise the spirit that lingers in the back of my mind. To understand the insanity that engulfed me I must comprehend that which my mind understands as sanity.

*

The entire tryst with the Internet and subsequently the friends I made there brought down tension levels inside me. My mind lost a lot of its anxiety and tranquility enveloped me. Dolly too was more relaxed than she had been for the last couple of years. When I played Solitary Man last year when Dolly was away, there were changes taking place at home and at work, two changes defining Sanity.

Normally when I was at home alone I would spend aggrandized time gawking at the idiot box, reading and meditation pushed onto the back burner. But last year this had dramatically changed. The brief brush with occult forces triggered by the discovery of powers that lay inside me and by
the faith demonstrated by Dolly found me steering towards reading and meditation once again. And it was a chain reaction; suddenly a sea of tranquility gently swirled around me -
more than ever before. The tensions of day-to-day living did not leave me all together but definitely became more bearable.

The knowledge I acquired brought a deeper appreciation of meditation, the peacefulness helping me focus on the one that I loved and worshipped, MAA Kali, affectionately known as MAA. There were times I would spend an hour or more deep in meditation, lost in her glory. To understand my meditation I had to understand MAA. It was a book in English acquired a while ago that made me understand the symbolic representation of the picture that I worshipped.

MAA is always depicted as a naked woman, black skinned. Kala means darkness and Kali the one that takes this darkness away. Just as all colors of the spectrum mix into black and yet black remains unchanged, so too Kali, who is pictured as a dark woman, takes away all the darkness and yet remains unchanged.

She removes mental conflict, egotistical attachment making a garland of man’s perplexity, symbolized by the garland of heads she wears around her neck. Though naked as all humans are at birth, she is also shown to wear all karmas as her ornaments, stopping chattering voices of an active mind, allowing her devotees to experience the purity of inner peace in the absorption of solitude. The most striking feature is a long red tongue protruding from her mouth, limply hanging in mid air. The tongue is smeared in blood. Her eyes too are large and blaze with an ethereal fire. Similarly all other physical depictions are symbolic of Mother Nature and those that I understood as I delved deeper into her form. She is worshipped with many names each having a symbolic representation of human desire and She the remover of each one of them.

It is known that humans have a similar genetic code and in India it is believed that each is born with an individual and distinct karmic code. It is this karma that determines the type of birth we take – rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief - free-will determining the kind of life we eventually lead. Similarly it is believed that diverse karma determines what kind of religious or spiritual path one follows.

The more I read the more I understood the path that was destined for me. It was up to my freewill to decide to tread on it or shun it. And tread I did.

With serenity that enveloped me at home change took place at work too. The target of cracking and recreating the formula in my lab seemed closer than it had been before. I worked at it diligently and every step brought me closer to the mother lode.

My friends on the net ensured that I had someone to talk to, someone to flirt with and someone who made me feel wanted, every day. It was but natural that communication with Dolly was restricted as she had no access to the Net and phone calls were expensive.

This contentment and tranquility at home and work could be the closest my mind could come to defining sanity.

There was another positive fall out, the return of poetry in my life. When in school I had been fascinated by the way words flowed in a poem and by college I was making attempts at creating some of my own. It was never to win awards nor to appreciate the language, the impetus always a pretty lass. I had discovered how weak-kneed women got every time a poem was written to woo them. And my feeble attempts were always better than the lack of any from competing males.

But my poetry was jinxed; every woman that I ever wooed with my poems left me. It was never crass words or dumb thoughts making a reader take flight. In fact the reverse was always true, the poems having their desired effect leading to romantic evenings, moonlight walks and droopy love-filled eyes. Then some obscure event or a series of events would change all of this and a breakup would ensue. The long and short of it was that I would lose the woman I thought I loved, the one who loved my poetry.

In Dolly I had the perfect mate and one who had amply demonstrated a lack of sufficient will to ever leave me. And in one of those quiet evenings, body far from her, my heart pining, tranquility encompassing me, when sanity gave life to my soul, words flowed. The next day it was on its way to the one who deserved it, the one I did not need to woo, the one who lived in my heart, the one who was a part of me.

Her phone call came immediately after she received it, voice quivering, thanking me, astonished that I had kept this talent hidden from her. I still remember it verbatim…

Ode to My Wife

When you are not here with me,

I realize how much I miss you.

The more I think about it,

The more I want to kiss you.

When you are not here with me,

I miss your warm body next to mine

Every night when

The moon and the stars shine.

When you are not here with me,

I miss your smile,

The special one you reserve for me

After I have traveled many a mile.

When you are not here with me,

I miss your hug,

The one you give me

Every time my tired shoulders shrug.

When you are not here with me,

I miss making love
;

The warmth, the passion, the tender words

C
aress me gently as a dove.

When you are not here with me,

Your words in my ears do fly
;

The way you say ‘I love you’

Makes my twinkling eyes cry.

When you are not here with me,

I miss you so much.

But then I know that you are in my heart

Where I hope to keep you: till death us do part.

Nature itself provides ample proof that for a major event to take place critical mass has to be achieved, be it a nuclear plant going online, be it rain falling from the skies, or be it achieving Nirvana. There has to be an event or a series of events that act as a trigger or a series of triggers to achieve the ultimate. And at the same time when critical mass is achieved a hundred things could go wrong - a nuclear plant could become a nuclear disaster, rainfall could become a storm and on the path to Nirvana a brain could short-circuit. This was exactly what was destined to happen to me.

The foundation had been laid by my interactions with strangers on the Net. Snow falling on a mountain slope, steadily, over a period of time, quite like the events in my life, etching themselves on the contours of my mind. With every fresh snowfall, a new layer was added, building on the previous one, shrouding it but never eliminating it. Tranquility! This happened with painful persistence till the mountain reached critical mass, awaiting that one trigger that could cause a devastating avalanche or cause the ice to melt gently, giving birth to scores of rivers and streams.

That is the way my mind was, my friends bringing me comfort, my work building up anxiety, mediation taking me deeper inside my soul and everything around me waiting for an avalanche or Nirvana to happen, sanity at its definable best, the calm before the storm.

It was the 5
th
of August exactly a year ago when the season’s few remaining snowfalls were scheduled to assault my fragile state of mind. None of my friends was online when I logged in and soon I was back in the familiar confines of an Indian chat room. My attention was grabbed by an ID that was chatting in there because it bore the name of my beloved wife, reading
Dolly66
.

*

A chill runs through my bones, my breath coming in short gasps. The mere mention of her ID triggers an avalanche of thoughts. I have to fight to control this reaction, face the dragon that stands outside the door. My thoughts turn to MAA.

Please give me the strength to comprehend and not get swept away by the pain!

The chair is losing its comfort, the prison walls closing around me. Sweat threatens to seep despite being doggedly fought by the cold air-conditioner air. My eyelids race to fuse with my brow, eyes burning. A year of procrastination has deposited another mountain of snow ready for another avalanche, and this time I will not allow it. This time the dragon will be slain.

*

Amusement was the first emotion to flirt with me, fast changing to awe at the odds of finding a person with my wife’s name in a chat room. At any given time the odds of this were one in millions and, if narrowed down to just Indian chat rooms, were still a mind-boggling one in hundreds of thousands. I was not about to let the opportunity pass.

The greeting I sent the ID was different because I used my wife’s name to break the ice. I merely stated that my wife was also named Dolly. The response was instantaneous and humorous.

Dolly66
: he he he, its me, vik, yr wife.

One innocent remark that set an avalanche in motion!

She had been chatting with some chap in the main chat room, so I took the opportunity to browse her profile. It stated that she was 32 - my age group, married - as I was, mother of two kids - quite unlike me. Her profile was honest enough, in stark contrast to the chat she was engaged in. I clearly read her stating that she was a 24-year-old college student, very single. The virtues of honesty and the pitfalls of deceit had ensured that Rules for the New World were clearly defined in my mind - honesty stayed, deceit walked.

I waited patiently, watching the events unfold, a mute, cynical spectator. As normally happens, the two lost interest in each other, and there was a message from Dolly66 asking me if I was free to chat with her.

I had to know why she had lied and chose an arrow of diplomacy to fire at her. I asked her age and her marital status. I could attribute the answer I received to her clandestinely looking up my profile, the one that honestly mentioned who and what I was. She startled me by her honesty, stating she was 32, married and mother of two kids. So far so good!

I probed further asking why she had stated otherwise in the chat room. Her reply was eloquently simple: no one wanted to chat with a married mother-of-two, while a zillion hounded a single twenty-four-year-old. I had no choice but to accept this and move on. I should have questioned the motives of wanting a zillion to hound her, a clue that would have warned me of impending danger. But no, Rationality was my consort, assuring me that there was no real reason for me to be suspicious.

As was customary, we exchanged cursory details, her name being Dolly Nair, an expatriate from Kerala now living in Singapore. A lot of South Indians, especially from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, had made Singapore their home, and hence I was not surprised. She had to leave but promised to keep in touch through Messenger.

The days lumbered on. I rarely caught her online the first few days after our first meeting. With my friends it was customary that offline messages be left if one did not find the other online. The other customary practice was that whenever a friend of mine saw me log on, a greeting was flashed and me reciprocating arduously. With Dolly66 all this was conspicuous by its absence. Over a period of time we did manage to hold conversation, keeping it light and friendly. I got to know that her husband was a leading cardiovascular surgeon in a large hospital there. Things were going apace till one day I happened to praise the husband.

It all started by her telling me that she was mostly alone with her kids because hubby was busy probing someone’s chest. I responded by telling her that what he did was very noble and that she should be proud of it. She listened for a while, agreeing with me, till she could take it no more, unleashing a torrent of pent-up emotions.

She told me that she had not made love in the last two years, sacrificed her career for him, looked after the kids, kept the home fire ablaze only to discover that he was having an affair with a doctor. A small twig snapped inside me.