Happiness...

It was awfully hot and humid, I had been waiting for a ride for quite a while, when eventually I squeezed in the back seat of an auto-rickshaw. A warm gust of wind ruffled my hair, bringing in some strange smell of dust and sweat...it wasn't really turning out to be a great day....I had been feeling listless for quite sometime now, a lot of things were hell bent on ruining my happiness. Well, I reasoned with myself, maybe it was just jitters.... I had decided to get married to my five year long boyfriend, there's bound to be some nerves...There were lots of things I wasn't sure of, whether I was capable of such a commitment, whether I had become too much of a cynic...I had been quite a romantic during my teens, but I had grown out of those adolescent dreams long back, life had conjured a reality from the dreams, which were not quite interchangeable.....to cut a long story short, I was terrified of making a wrong decision. The auto braked suddenly, and a youngish boy got in. He looked quite chirpy, and his happiness bothered me. He was yapping into his mobile, talking about a prospective job interview which he had day after. I didn't mean to eavesdrop but he was literally shouting into speaker, so there...As I sat squished between a heavy sweating lady and the boy, excerpts from his conversation came floating to me...somehow, his naive optimism touched me and I wondered why don't people reach out to others...I mean we search for a sense of connection throughout our lives, yet on any public transport, people go out of their way to avoid other fellow travelers...so I decided to let down the boundary....

“Hey, I don't mean to pry, but I heard you talking on the phone...”I stuttered wondering how foolish I sounded, thank goodness I had the good sense to wait till he hung up at least, “well, I just wanted to wish you luck for your interview...” I trailed off, thinking maybe that's what boundaries are for, feeling stupid....The auto had stopped to let him down, he got down, paid the auto driver his due, and smiled at me, “Thank you!”. I felt instantly relieved and my weary day all of a sudden felt a lot lighter. I smiled thinking how I was dwelling on trivial stuffs, instead decided to focus on listening to some music.

The time I reached home, my good humor had dialed down a lot, it could have been the weather as well, why won't it rain?? I found my mum sitting by the veranda as usual. She liked watching people go by the street. I went in for a quick shower, and I seated myself beside her when I was done, wondering what she liked about watching people passing by...we started talking about some things, she was talking about my wedding and what preparations we needed to do, and what not...then, she started reminiscing about her marriage...Now, all of us have some preconceptions about marriage and relationships, and most of them are steeped in childhood memories of our parents and loved ones...so I knew my parents were very close and most of all, they seemed like great friends...they would spend a lot of time talking to each other...but I was not quite aware of the romantic angle between them, I had discovered a bunch of letters from my father to my mum, as a child quite by accident, but they were indecipherable for me at that moment...and somehow, they were lost over time, so I didn't get a chance to really read them...I had grown up with the notion that my father was a person wrapped in his own world, sometimes I felt he was a tad cold...there was a incident, I remember when I was quite young, my mum was peeling mangoes and she cut herself on the knife, I was scared and I ran to my father saying, “She cut herself”. He was reading a newspaper, and he barely looked up, I was struck by his indifference....I was awakened from my reveries by mother's voice, and she was sharing an incident from her early days of marriage, before I was born...

Years ago, just after they got married, my mum had suffered from a brief spell of problems with infertility, which her gynecologist had assured would pass in time. But, one could imagine, how much she might have suffered from subtle or not too subtle comments or nudges or concerns from relatives and friends...and the situation would have gone worse if her mother-in-law would have made any comments, it was precisely at this stage when my father intervened and he spoke quite firmly to his mother (which was rather bold on his part since he was the quintessential mother's child!), making it quite clear if anyone from the family made any more snide or other comments about her, they would move out....I was quite surprised to say the least! People surprise you, to say the least, this was the same person who had seemed so cold and indifferent to me, or maybe we assume the worst about people pretty quickly.

A sudden flash of thunder started me, it was raining. I smiled, thinking how easily I had given up on love and romance, when I had my heart broken once or twice, without waiting for the weather to change...and now when there's a chance of happiness, I am too scared to reach out, just as I was apprehensive to talk to the boy in the auto and the way I was pretentious enough to believe that I knew my parent's relationship from outside. They had shared 35 years of togetherness and my mum still relished how he had stood up for her that day....it was the same warmth creeping up my heart that I had felt in the auto when the stranger had smiled at me, and I felt grateful to be alive, maybe a little bent and a lot out of shape, but life was definitely good.