I almost mistook her for a seventy year old ailing old lady, as she laboriously made her way towards the swimming pool, limping, her hair white as silver, bent to one side, her hip dis-aligned and crooked. Climbing each step with palpable pain. She had gained more weight since I last saw her, and her hair had completely whitened within the past two years. Her face permanently contorted with pain. I decided not to bother her and to just let her be.
I made acquaintance with Kalpana just by chance, and I learnt from her that she was struggling with a knee problem that left her bed ridden most often. There was this one day when I had ringed her bell and she took inordinately long to open the door. When she opened the door, she was on her knees. She had walked on her knees to open the door. Embarrassed and jolted at seeing her that way, I composed myself with some effort and expressed concern. I tried to help but she brushed me aside. I walked away shaken and helplessly concerned.
I did not know her real age. Judging by the age of her kids, she could not be more than five or six years my senior. But we looked twenty years apart even then.
After that encounter, I met her once or twice on my morning walks, but soon I had forgotten all about her. So when I saw her after almost a gap of two years, I was surprised how quickly she had added a decade and a half to her age.
Kalpana was living alone with her two girls, one 15 and the other 7. Her husband had abandoned them, but was sending maintenance. I learnt this from another neighbour. She was pining over the pain and making herself sicker and sicker. And so a lot of her sickness was from a mistaken sense of failure. She was just not accepting the truth. She was holding on to the regret and pain so dearly that there was little space for anything else in her life.
And I cannot help thinking, if a woman was to abandon a man in the same state, and there are several such examples, do men also drain themselves out in pain? Or is the society sending signals to women to pine over the loss and therefore they comply?
There is a lot of truth in it. In fact when a woman is abandoned she is considered doomed. People feel free to sympathise but the society does not come out and support the woman to stand up for herself. What would it have been for Kalpana? Did she break down the day her husband left? Did she fall on the floor on that moment and did not get up for hours? Did she call someone and share her pain? What did they tell her when she was looking for solace? Did they blame her for the incident and did they ask her to keep trying to get him back in her life?
She failed to notice that she was the only adult in her children's lives, yet so far from being an example for them. Nor did she notice that she was propagating palpable pain inside the four walls of her house, I had felt it when I went to her house. She was lying to her neighbours, telling them that her husband would be back soon! Not making any serious efforts to get on her feet. It appears that she was hoping that her sickness would bring the man back in her life.
Why couldn't she understand that people do not leave to come back, definitely not when one weakens by that person's absence. Blaming her husband does not make sense to me. It is a broken marriage, what broke it is not for others to judge. I wish Kalpana would know the responsibility that she was left with, I wish she would rise to the occasion and let her daughters learn the skill of being a self respecting individuals. I wish so many things for Kalpana, but she seems to have stopped wishing. She seems to have lost the battle even before it began.
She is not an exception, she is most ordinary in her seemingly extraordinary pain. Even her pain is not extraordinary. Marriages fail and some more miserably than the others. Some people are less trustworthy than the others. People will be people, civility is learnt by some while others find it hard to inculcate. We tend to judge them by their gender, but inability to keep a relationship is gender neutral, just as much as the willingness to keep a relationship going, is gender neutral.
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