Authors: Vivek Mehra

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