Blank
Pages! He stared down at them with the unaccustomed weight of a pen in his
hands wondering desolately whether he had the words to get his life back.
Geeta’s face appeared, obscuring the pages, with the icy far-away look that had
made him feel an outcast far more than any words could have done. Remembering
the way her face, posture and tone of voice had made him feel the last time he
saw her, he despaired of any chance of reconciliation with her.
At
that time all he had felt was anger at the betrayal of his beliefs and had felt
that her departure from his life would make little impact on him. He had not
been prepared for the feeling of vacuum in his heart or for the fact that he
could find no savor in all the things that he had, till then, enjoyed. His
pride would still have stood in the way of approaching her for reconciliation
but last week’s incident had upset all his notions.
So,
here he was staring down at these blank pages trying to find the words that
would bring Geeta back to him. His calls had gone unattended; his SMSes ignored
and emails probably deleted unseen. His only chance now was that a letter from
him would get her attention.
* * * * * *
He
could still recollect his early days after his marriage to Geeta. She was not a
raving beauty but her eyes were lovely and, when she smiled, her whole face lit
up with irresistible charm. She smiled often those days and was so
accommodating then that he still had difficulty in reconciling to the fact that
she could have become so aloof to him in the five odd years of marriage.
On
their honeymoon, he had presented her with a red salwar-kameez. Her eyes had
looked at him with so much affection that his heart had turned over. Then she
said softly, “This is a lovely present, Ajay! My favorite color is blue,
however. Would it be possible to exchange this?”
“I
love red, Geeta! Blue is such an insipid color. Please get used to wearing
red”, he had said. Her eyes showed hurt for a moment. Then, she had smiled
brilliantly and said, “Ok!”
Even
though theirs had been an arranged marriage, Geeta seemed to have so much
affection for him even in the initial days that she would do anything to please
him. It was not as though she was financially dependent on him considering that
she was a banker as he was and they worked at almost coeval positions.
In
fact, looking back, he could hardly remember her wearing blue dresses in the
five years of their married life. It was still surprising to him that such an
accommodating person had turned so adamantine in a short span of five years.
* *
* * * *
The
initial days after marriage and the process of settling into a new routine are
normally turbulent especially when it comes to a working couple. He had not
found it very difficult, however. They had, somehow, settled in remarkably well
very soon. Now, in retrospect, it seemed to him that it was Geeta’s soft-spoken
and generous nature that ensured the achievement of the equilibrium with little
acrimony. He did help her around the house but, now that he saw those days with
more clarity, whenever there was something disputatious it had been Geeta who
had given way with grace.
Food
had, however, been a problem. Neither of them was too fond of eating out and,
thus, Geeta had taken over the cooking but her idea of food was too chilli-laden
for his bland tastes.
“God!
You are expected to add chillies to the vegetables not vegetables to the
chillies”
“I’m
sorry, Ajay! At my home, we eat food as hot as this.”
“You
are no longer at your parents’ place, Geeta! Please make something edible for
me”
It
took about three months before the food became palatable to him. Till then the
dining table had been a battlefield from where Geeta had invariably retreated
in tears. He had soothed away her hurt in the night but it was only after she
had learned to cook blandly enough that the house had turned peaceful.
* *
* * * *
Life
had gone on with relatively little friction for the next five years. True,
there had been disputes when Geeta put her office responsibilities above their
commitments to his family. Initially she, at least, used to apologize and try
to give her flimsy reasons for not being able to come to his cousin’s wedding
or his nephew’s first birthday. Lately she had taken to listening to his
righteous anger in meek silence but did not change her ways. That was the only
fly in the ointment as far as his marital life was concerned.
The
bombshell when it fell was totally unexpected. Geeta had got a coveted posting
in UK from her
bank and came home excited about it.
“You
refused the posting, didn’t you?” said he, confidently.
“Why
would I?”
“How
can you shift to London when I am
working in Mumbai?”
“You
can find a job in London, can’t
you?”
“I
am doing very well in this bank now and can expect to reach the top. How can I
jeopardize all that? You go over tomorrow and tell your office that you cannot
take up this posting.”
Geeta
was silent. He was sure that she would refuse the posting the next day. It had
been a long tiring day for him and he went to sleep almost immediately after.
The
next day he came back from his bank and found Geeta all packed up.
“Ajay!
I am moving to my parent’s place right now. I have taken up my posting and will
be leaving for London within a month.”
“What??
Geeta! What do you mean?”
“Listen,
Ajay! I have not been happy in this marital life of ours for quite some time
now. I am not sacrificing my career merely in order to live the sort of
frustrating life that I have been leading till now.”
“What
do you mean not happy? I have been helping you around the house, putting up with
your entire obsession with your office and giving you a decent lifestyle. What
do you think anyone else would do better than me?”
Geeta
flared up. “Helping me around the
house? Putting up with my obsession? Nothing that the two of us
did around the house was our job with
you, was it? It was mine and when you
did something you were magnanimously
helping me out. You never stopped to think about what makes me happy, either.
You never bothered to ask me how I felt about the life we were leading or what
sort of lifestyle I would have wanted to lead. Don’t talk to me about how good
a husband you have been to me!”
“Ha!
So if you think you can find someone better than me go right ahead.” he yelled.
Never
had he seen Geeta look as she did then. She gave the impression of an aloof ice
sculpture and her eyes looked at him with total disdain. In a voice cold as the
wind from the Arctic she said, “I have left my contacts
on the table. You may require them for legal purposes. Goodbye, Ajay!” Her
voice and demeanor made the parting seem final and irrevocable.
* * * * * *
He
had still not got over Geeta’s betrayal. Three months had gone by and she had
been in London for the last two of
them. He has thought that she would come over to him for reconciliation but she
had not bothered to even inform him of her departure. Sometimes it seemed to
him that she had merely been putting on an act of affection when they were
still a couple. At other times, he blamed her career ambitions for getting in
the way of their marital life.
What
he could never understand was why she was so angry about the life that they had
lead. He had never forced anything on her and she could always have done what
she wanted. He had never refused to do anything that she had asked him to do
though, of course, he did grumble about it as who did not? It seemed to him
like she had unreasonably accused him and justified her act of putting her
career above their relationship by blaming him without reason. He missed her
badly, nevertheless, and was sometimes sorely tempted to call her up but his
pride would not let him do so.
* *
* * * *
It
was a busy day at office and his boss called him in just when he was planning
to call it a day.
“Listen,
Ajay! You will have to stay back tonight. Remember that project loan we are
processing? Apparently the client is in a hurry and our management wants it
processed expeditiously. You have to make a presentation for me by tomorrow so
that I can have it cleared for taking up with the credit committee.”
He
was irritated. It was close to 8 PM
and his boss was practically ordering him to stay without sleep that night
without even the courtesy of making it a request. He swallowed his resentment,
collected the details and went back to his cabin.
It
was 4 AM by the time he was done with
the job. He saw little reason to go back home since he would have to be back by
9 AM to hand over the fruits of his
work to his boss.
While
explaining the details of the presentation to his boss, he could not help
yawning repeatedly.
“Sleepy
so early in the morning, Ajay?” said his boss, censoriously.
“Had
to stay at office all night to finish this presentation”
“That
is your job, Ajay!” said his boss dismissively and returned to the work at
hand.
Ajay
was furious. First he had been asked to do something out of the way,
sacrificing his sleep, without even the courtesy of an apology. Now that he had
done it his boss was taking it totally for granted. No wonder this man was the
least-liked boss in the entire bank.
For
no reason his mind went back to Geeta, then. Suddenly, the reason why Geeta
left him hit him like a douche of icy cold water.
* *
* * * *
How
could he have been so self-centered? So insensitive? So domineering? He had
never thought of himself as a bad person but, suddenly, it seemed to him that
he had been positively evil in his treatment of Geeta. He had always thought
that he loved Geeta but, now, it seemed to him that he had not even known the
meaning of love.
Geeta
had loved him or, at least, tried to ensure that they lead a life of love. She
had tried to make him happy at the cost of sacrificing her own likes. He, on
the other hand, had not never ever bothered to even learn what she liked nor
had he given any importance to the likes and dislikes that she had voluntarily
expressed. Worse still, he had taken her sacrifices for granted without even a
cursory acknowledgement. In effect, what he disliked in his boss was exactly
what he had done to Geeta. Now, it
seemed to him a wonder that she had stayed with him for as long as five years.
It
was neither what he sought her to do nor what he did not do that was the
problem for Geeta. He realized that now. It was his attitude. When first he had
presented her the red salwar and she had expressed a preference for blue he
could have said, “I love seeing you in red, Geeta! Will you please wear it for
my sake” and she would have happily done so. Instead he had laid down the rule.
She had been hurt but still generous enough to fall in with his wishes for all
their time together and it had not even struck him as necessary to tell her how
much he appreciated that.
He
cringed when he thought of their initial battles about food. Why had it never
struck him that if he felt difficulty eating hot food, Geeta would have equal
difficulty in eating bland food? After all, your tastes are determined by what
you have been brought up on and changing them would be as difficult for her as
for him. Instead, he had imposed his tastes on her, derided her when she was
changing over her style of cooking and had grudgingly acknowledged the
change-over. Never once had he even thought about how much affection she must
have had for him to put up with all that and, still, change her tastes to suit.
It
seemed to him that Geeta had asked little of him but an acknowledgement of the
fact that she was doing things to please him because she wanted him to be happy
and not because she felt bound to do so. By refusing to even give her that
acknowledgement he had made her feel like a servant instead of his wife. Now he could realize that Geeta must have
felt that there was no use in discussing her career with him since he had never
once bothered to consider her point of view.
She
had been an essentially non-aggressive person and, subconsciously, he had
equated that with weakness. Had she been truly weak she would have continued to
compromise with him and lead a loveless life till the end of their days
together. When she showed how strong she was by deciding to leave him, he had
lashed out in surprised anger and, probably, lost her for ever.
* *
* * * *
Geeta
had been like a flower ready to give freely of her fragrance and he had chosen
to try to crush the flower to get the fragrance. He smiled wryly. The time for
poetic fancies was when Geeta had still not lost hope of a loving relationship
with him. They seemed out of place now that she had frozen her emotions against
him. So frozen had she become that for one week now all his attempts at
communicating with her had fallen on deaf ears.
A
wave of guilt rushed through him. If he had caused Geeta to become less willing
to love, less willing to be generous with the people around her and frozen in
her emotions; if he had indeed crushed all the fragrance out of her then that
was a sin far worse than the five years of, what he now acknowledged as, misery that he had caused her to live through.
It seemed more important to him, now,
to apologize for his unpardonable behavior than to even try to get her back in
his life.
He
bent towards the blank pages – as blank as his desolate life – and started to
write.
This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 35; the thirty-fifth edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following 
