a short story by Ravikumar Pillai
Bengaluru Airport's Terminal 2 lifted her mood every time she flew in or out. Bamboo and cane frames, glittering water cascades and overflowing greenery of the non-synthetic variety overwhelmed her. Riya frequently jetted to far-flung client sites for quite some time. Having built up her reputation as a sharp and meticulous professional, she was much sought after as a project team leader, especially for onsite assignments at key overseas client locations.
The top-notch IT firm had picked her up in a tough campus selection with multiple tests and gruelling interviews, both of which, she thought, teased her smartness and nerves. She made her maiden trip to Bengaluru one monsoon evening drenched in vengeful rain. The overnight bus trip soon became her routine over the years as she shuffled between the exuberance of work assignments and the nostalgic trappings of her laidback hometown.
As days went by, her comfort with the immediate context of the people, places and schedules relegated to fainter shades of memory the temptation to crawl back home.
Bengaluru seemed to her like a teenage girl approaching puberty blushes. It was a city itching to expand in a flurry. The massive Tech Park burgeoned in front of her on a sprawling farmland. A clutch of skyscrapers sprouted like mushrooms spurred by a sporadic sprinkling of raindrops. The messy traffic, shabby shanties by the side of posh office buildings and the crude eating places around the corner with not-so-clean tables and counters made up an ensemble of contradictions in style and substance. In a city that was searching for its new and hazy identity amidst the crazy buzz and creepy vehicles, her search for individual moorings seemed like a corollary in tandem.
How her routines transformed from leisurely academics to the brisk and mechanical preciseness of schedules and deliverables amazed her.
Sooner than she imagined, her office routines bunched into priorities upon priorities, the ‘urgent’ piled upon the ‘important’. The mundane predictability of her engagements made her uneasy. She often brooded over how the demand on her for spontaneity and precision resembled the hurry and monotony of the manual labourers who trooped in and out of the construction sites all around, which she could see through the floor-to-wall glass panes of her office. The city was indeed a telescopic conjecture of many worlds, diverse people and multiple tongues! Wasn’t she just an automaton, keyed to dance to the preset tunes, just the same way the casual and contract workers deployed at the building sites set about their tasks soaked in sweat and boredom?
The work routines and exacting tightness of deliverables swelled an urge in her to desperately look forward to the weekends when they could freak out and get lost in the evening bash, which would extend deep into the midnight and might even touch the sunrise by a whisker.
Riya dispassionately reminisced how instinctively she started enjoying the lightness, anonymity and absolute lack of inhibition of those nightly meetups when anything to do with the office, assignments and deadlines was a strict no-no. There was no place for sentimental stuff about ‘back home’, campus life or any such drags that could pull one back to the ground realities, which were for another day. The floating moments of the weekend party time were just for the moments on hand! Those hours were meant to lift the spirits, free up the thoughts and let pure and simple, ‘here-and-now’ enjoyment of the present expand to fill the context.
She prided herself on her ability to be impersonal, detached, cold, independent and not swayed by emotional deluge. Now, when she looks back, she wonders how on earth she got entangled in an unlikely relationship with Rohit, the aloof, nerd-like team leader who was her boss in a couple of projects.
During the on-site project sojourns, the weekend bashes and later as their affinity sprouted, in private eat-outs and binge-drinking sessions, she was, perhaps unconsciously, sizing up the guy in terms of ‘best fit’ for her temperament, ambitions and independence. The privacy of emotional space was important for her in any long-term alignment. And, by her gut feeling, she decided that Rohit would make a good enough partner, presumably manageable and accommodative.
Both were single children, had spent much of their studies on campuses, away from home and were by nature too independent to seek parental acknowledgement, let alone advice, for their relationship.
So that was how, as two adults, with pronounced self-image, they decided to tie the knot at the end of a short and intense courtship. They took the civil marriage route and made the formalities simple with just a handful of friends and colleagues to witness and wish them.
While congratulating them, their manager, the burly, pot-bellied Ram Iyer announced, “As a matter of official policy, we can't have spouses in the same team. Office is office and home is home and never the twine shall meet”, he said in tone coated in chicanery. What an irony that the first act of the organization, upon their marriage, was to formally separate them into two separate teams!
In the evening, they toasted each other with a wholesome serving of premium red wine to celebrate their formal coming together. “Riya, look, till this morning I was your boss at the office. Now that is no longer the case. But I have now become the boss of you as a person, lock stock and barrel”.
Could be that he made an innocuous comment, made it deliberately sound pompous, with a tinge of teasing. But Riya felt it like an unwarranted offence to her self-image.
The customary novelty and moderation of the first days of marriage were conspicuously absent between Riya and Rohit. That was only natural since they knew each other like the palms of their hands. At least, that was what Riya presumed. She was soon proven wrong about her premature and subjective inference. Between a man and a woman, there is a layered mutuality that refuses to reveal in a spurt. The more you spend time together, the more you realise how little you know each other!
Riya had this nagging feeling of frost having settled rather too early upon her post-marriage relationship with Rohit. Their assignment to different work teams, with client focus at odds with each other, limited their huddles to the homely hours that were too late, too tiring and distracted by stray thoughts.
It was a Saturday evening. Rohit had called his best friend from his college days, Paul, and his wife Jenni for an exclusive dinner, with just four of them around. Once they eased up and their tiredness of the day was wiped away in the small talk, egoistic claims and trumpeting of client meeting successes followed, lifting their moods high. The single malt that Paul brought along as a special gift added an infectious elation to the setting.
Rohit went on a tangent about his expertise in ethical hacking. Any serious and composed talk can degenerate into a wayward rant in no time. He went on about social media mining and hacking into the messaging trail. “I am proud of my power to do discrete and advanced social media mining and expose the shades of people’s hidden messages, they think are tucked away in the cyber safe lockers on the cloud. You may call it unethical and crude. To me, though, the exposition of social media blind spots is an extraordinary art and an awesome power. Just the other day, I traced the messaging thread of Riya’s past chats. I now know a lot about the dimmer side of my better half that I never knew while we were on a date”.
Riya was frozen for a minute. She felt like the skin was peeling off from all over her body and she stood exposed with a reddish, blood-oozing muscular frame.
She excused herself on the alibi of a terrible headache, rushed to the bedroom, closed the door and just fell on the bed, unable to cry, unable to feel.
For a couple of days, they did not talk to each other or look eye-to-eye and went about their chores as if the other person did not exist. Slowly, over a few days, the heaviness of the experience melted away, or rather she chose to believe so. It was she who took the initiative to feign the return to normalcy.
The first holiday season since their marriage was around the corner. The Christmas to New Year interregnum has been traditionally the time for travel, resort-hopping and just plain break from the hustle and bustle that usually kept the techies on their toes.
She was determined to make a sincere try at making their vibes sync once more. “Why don’t we try Maldives for a change?” Surfing, sun and a bit of yoga and meditation thrown in, the pitch by the travel agency’s mailer did sound energizing to her.
As usual, Rohit’s reply was a silent nod, a passive acquiescence to her suggestion. She felt irritated by his monosyllable and instantaneous response, the pattern of which had been getting on her nerves for quite some time.
What turned Rohit from an alert and spontaneous guy to a boring, blank and introverted ‘moron’? Might be, this was his natural self; what she fell for was a feigned, puffed-up version which he projected to the outside world! Was she responsible for his apparent regression? She felt an irrational guilt about the premature souring of their togetherness.
Lying on the pristine Maldivian beach, looking up at the starry skies, she mumbled, “I was thinking, why not take a break and let us have a baby? We can finish off the agenda early on and then get back to the career rat race, with one hassle less!”
Rohit’s reply stunned her. “I think we need not hurry into parenthood and all its obligations and commitments. Let us give ourselves breathing space and allow the rhythm and pace of gradual settling down a chance. Three to five years of cooling off period between marriage and childbirth would be ideal”. The thread of conversation broke off abruptly even before the icebreaker was through.
She squirmed on the bed, restless to catch the evading sleep. “How dramatically has marriage changed my life? My time, my priorities and my body have all been converted into joint ownership, with the dominant say for the guy whom I wandered into, searching for an alignment that I hoped intensely to last for life”!
She got up, moved to the desk and switched on the table lamp. Opening her laptop, she, in near deliriousness, dived into the depths of obsessive analytics. What an irony that having come away to just forget the pressure of assignment sheets, Riya found the addictive world of tasks and schedules as a solace from the biting loneliness and the shrill silence enveloping her in her midnight sleeplessness!
The next day morning, as they finished their buffet breakfast in the poolside restaurant she said, with dispassionate casualness, “Rohit, I was keeping this a secret, just to divulge to you in private, away from work and home. I was sounded out last week to move to the US for an onsite project for a year and more. I am tempted to accept. Anyway, I sincerely feel that both of us need a break”.
Back in Bengaluru, she went through the formalities for the overseas move. In next day evening, she detoured from the office to visit Kavya, her collegemate and close friend, a lawyer at the High Court. After pleasantries and reminiscences of the days together on the campus, she came straight to the point. She briefed her about the fissures, irritants and indifference that had crept into her relationship with Rohit in such a short time from their marriage.
She said, “I want you to explore a joint divorce petition, which I will discuss with Rohit over the coming days. I think in my absence away on the assignment, he would see the heap of ice that has fallen on our fragile knot. Hopefully, with refinement, grace and no rancour, Rohit and I would manoeuvre our separation over the next few months. Being away and busy with my projects, I will be able to avoid any possibility of rash judgements or emotional concussions”.
In the night as they lay silent on the bed, she hugged Rohit and kissed him with a passion and intensity that surprised her as much as him! Both did not allow words to impede the spontaneity of their coming.
Early morning, Rohit left her at the airport for her long haul across the seas. Like a germinating seed, left to break out in the heat and rain, she left her plan for divorce to hibernate, sedated for the time being on a bed of tentativeness.
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