On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:16 PM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote:
> PS: this is the second time this week I am referencing Amit in a > conversation where he has not (yet) participated. :) > Oops, I don't mean to be rude with my non-participation, it's just that I don't participate in threads where I don't actually have something to contribute. I didn't have an arranged marriage, as it happens, so this is one of those. Though the piece you linked to is most excellent, and I also enjoyed reading the rest of this thread, especially Naren's account. He's the most uxorious man I know, with or without excellent whiskies. It's interesting how people change and married love changes with it. My wife and I were both completely different people when we met and fell in love in college 20+ years ago. In fact, we sometimes wonder what we saw in the other person then, and what they could possible have seen in us. Still, as we've grown as people, the love has grown and mutated, which is lucky, I guess, because it could be otherwise for no fault of any of ours, but simply because people change. I guess something like that happened to the author's parents in the piece you linked. Most charming. And if couples change, but change gradually, it's worth wondering if they happen to change and grow while not being with each other, and how they resume intimacy with a near one who's also part stranger. Since Udhay reproduced that Linda Pastan about marriage, I'll reproduce another one of her poems about just this: AFTER AN ABSENCE by Linda Pastan After an absence that was no one's fault we are shy with each other, and our words seem younger than we are, as if we must return to the time we met and work ourselves back to the present, the way you never read a story from the place you stopped but always start each book all over again. Perhaps we should have stayed tied like mountain climbers by the safe cord of the phone, its dial our own small prayer wheel, our voices less ghostly across the miles, less awkward than they are now. I had forgotten the grey in your curls, that splash of winter over your face, remembering the younger man you used to be. And I feel myself turn old and ordinary, having to think again of food for supper, the animals to be tended, the whole riptide of daily life hidden but perilous pulling both of us under so fast. I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. I had forgotten all the old business between us, like mail unanswered so long that silence becomes eloquent, a message of its own. I had even forgotten how married love is a territory more mysterious the more it is explored, like one of those terrains you read about, a garden in the desert where you stoop to drink, never knowing if your mouth will fill with water or sand. -- Amit Varma http://www.indiauncut.com http://www.twitter.com/amitvarma
