A few people who read my post Route No 23A, who had probably grown up on a healthy teenage diet of Georgette Heyer, Barbara Cartland and similar sundry pulp, asked me if I knew what happened to R. Life does not work like an M&B plot, fortunately or otherwise.
Here is the link to Route No 23A if you missed it the last time.
https://sgchalayil.blogspot.com/2012/07/route-no-23-a.html
I responded to them that when I left Chennai to enter the world of business I had left behind not just my home and family but all thought of R too. One reader asked me was I sad that I was leaving her without having let her know how I felt? Irrelevant question, I said. Did I think R knew that I was crazy about her? Irrelevant again, I said because my craze for R was not about winning a trophy in the form of her attention or affection. I was crazy because that is how I felt. Period.
As far as I was concerned R belonged to another as yet undefined world that I would not be a part of. I had the luxury of choosing if I wanted to keep the memories. Well, it is not quite anyone's choice to keep or reject memories, is it? Ask a dementia patient and he will tell you if it really is!
Inside the muggy and hot second class compartment of the Madras Bangalore mail, as I set out for IIMB, I remember I had more tears in my eyes than stars. Who were those tears for? I could not tell. My family that I was going away from? R? No idea.
It was a somewhat cold February last year when I was attending a social gathering in Bangalore. In the somewhat uncomfortable chill on the open terrace of my friend's bungalow I noticed an intense looking visage. The middle aged woman carried herself with oodles of grace at the same time.
As people mingled with the rest of the crowd I got to be introduced to the lady in question as R and her husband as P. (I still have to use anonymous names, in fact all the more so now.) As Iyengar as they ever come I said to myself.
It was not until the conversation picked up somewhat slowly and tentatively that it was the same R that I last seen in June 1980, two days before I left Madras to enrol at IIMB.
Without dragging the narrative further I got to hear that P had returned to India after having worked in many countries all over the world and that he had been a highly successful molecular scientist who had made his pile of cash from stock options. He drove an Innova Crysta, lived in a twelfth story penthouse that was probably worth two million dollars in a highly tony suburb of Bangalore. Their daughter was married to a New York money manager and son was doing his undergraduate in an Ivy League school. Copybook upper middle class Indian family that had made its fortunes in the prosperous west.
That was clearly a world far apart from that of a struggling academic who drove a car that was hugely popular among taxi drivers for its highly affordable total cost of ownership, whose sons were a long way off from the threshold of adulthood.
And that is the happy ending of another love story. Whoever said that love stories end happily only when boy and girl live together happily ever after. They could happily live together with another girl and boy too. The important thing is happiness and not being together.
Nanni...Namaskaaram...
PS: This post was written in March 2018. For numerous reasons I was not sure if I should publish it. The passage of a year and a half allows me to be more objective.
Here is the link to Route No 23A if you missed it the last time.
https://sgchalayil.blogspot.com/2012/07/route-no-23-a.html
I responded to them that when I left Chennai to enter the world of business I had left behind not just my home and family but all thought of R too. One reader asked me was I sad that I was leaving her without having let her know how I felt? Irrelevant question, I said. Did I think R knew that I was crazy about her? Irrelevant again, I said because my craze for R was not about winning a trophy in the form of her attention or affection. I was crazy because that is how I felt. Period.
As far as I was concerned R belonged to another as yet undefined world that I would not be a part of. I had the luxury of choosing if I wanted to keep the memories. Well, it is not quite anyone's choice to keep or reject memories, is it? Ask a dementia patient and he will tell you if it really is!
Inside the muggy and hot second class compartment of the Madras Bangalore mail, as I set out for IIMB, I remember I had more tears in my eyes than stars. Who were those tears for? I could not tell. My family that I was going away from? R? No idea.
It was a somewhat cold February last year when I was attending a social gathering in Bangalore. In the somewhat uncomfortable chill on the open terrace of my friend's bungalow I noticed an intense looking visage. The middle aged woman carried herself with oodles of grace at the same time.
As people mingled with the rest of the crowd I got to be introduced to the lady in question as R and her husband as P. (I still have to use anonymous names, in fact all the more so now.) As Iyengar as they ever come I said to myself.
It was not until the conversation picked up somewhat slowly and tentatively that it was the same R that I last seen in June 1980, two days before I left Madras to enrol at IIMB.
Without dragging the narrative further I got to hear that P had returned to India after having worked in many countries all over the world and that he had been a highly successful molecular scientist who had made his pile of cash from stock options. He drove an Innova Crysta, lived in a twelfth story penthouse that was probably worth two million dollars in a highly tony suburb of Bangalore. Their daughter was married to a New York money manager and son was doing his undergraduate in an Ivy League school. Copybook upper middle class Indian family that had made its fortunes in the prosperous west.
That was clearly a world far apart from that of a struggling academic who drove a car that was hugely popular among taxi drivers for its highly affordable total cost of ownership, whose sons were a long way off from the threshold of adulthood.
And that is the happy ending of another love story. Whoever said that love stories end happily only when boy and girl live together happily ever after. They could happily live together with another girl and boy too. The important thing is happiness and not being together.
Nanni...Namaskaaram...
PS: This post was written in March 2018. For numerous reasons I was not sure if I should publish it. The passage of a year and a half allows me to be more objective.
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