Green and Peacock Blue Days

That was our last trip together. We both knew that. She had decided to get married. I knew she would be lost to me forever after that. Marriages, even good ones, tend to do something like that. Bad ones surely had a way of totally gobbling up the woman. It would eat at our core, tell us we are door mats, a cog in the system of endless family dinners, full-time servants, who should ideally, never be heard, seen, or felt. We were taught the fine art of being invisible from our childhoods. That, we realized later, was the training to be daughters-in-laws and wives. 

    I failed spectacularly at it. She was, unfortunately for her, a roaring successful. 

     She was never invisible. But, her deep empathy for others worked against her. She knew (magically, I would say) who needed what, the moment she entered a room. Physical comfort, emotional succour, even intellectual stimulation… she gave everything selflessly. In fact, she reveled in it. 

     But, I knew she would be destroyed by her decision. It hardly came from self-love. It came from self-hatred. I strangely felt sorry for the young man who had haplessly got trapped in her very own elaborate schemes of hating herself. I knew he would see through her one day. I knew he would be destroyed in her flame of cynical anger directed against her own beautiful self. He was, just collateral damage, nothing more. But, before he destroyed himself, I knew he would try everything in his power to destroy her. All for nothing- that was the tragedy of it which I knew, I saw and I resented. 

     Yet, that day was magical. We went to an old fort in the northern tip of the state. We were totally alone in that vastness. She wore a green and peacock blue dress. The dupatta flying in the light breeze. It became a combination of colors, I always associated with her later in life. The grass in the fort was parrot green. She emerged from the undulations of the hills, like a goddess, a part of it. Young, beautiful and liltingly earthy. 

     I snapped a mental picture that day. For I knew, this moment is passing. And, I knew then, we are alive now… But soon, we won’t be!