My Experiments with Youth

I think the mid-life crisis hit me when I was about thirty-two. A bit early, I admit, but we are being honest here, little shrink. And you think your life is dreary, huh? Dealing with lunatics, even lunatic surrogates, must make you feel really sane.

The child was about four and I was fat, addicted to two vodkas in a Screwdriver a night and Nirula's Hot Choc Fudge with extra nuts, and eating as little of anything else as was humanly possible. It is, I have to say, a little difficult to see a full frontal or dorsal of oneself in a small portrait mirror in the bathroom, which is all I had back home in Delhi. But we moved to Bombay, and for the first month, as the house was being readied, stayed in a hotel. In an elevator mirrored on all four sides I saw myself from every possible angle for the first time. I saw the better half looking at me in exactly the same way as I was. Dressed in an over-sized T-shirt and checked cotswool PJs that were also too loose, I looked the epitome of unattractive.

Luckily for me, in retrospect, it mattered little how I looked. Life, I had already decided, was going to be from one vodka to the next, with some fights about dagger-angles thrown in in the interim spaces. Ah yes, the dagger-angles, young shrink, were sometimes the most important aspect of life - they had to be dusted and placed just so, otherwise the better half's OCD kicked in big time. What do I mean by dagger-angles? Sorry, the back story has something long-winded attached to what the better half thought of as his legacy from his Rajput genes. A collection of daggers that had to be placed not just parallel to each other but also at precisely thirty-two and a half degrees from the edge of the mantelshelf. If they were thirty or even thirty-four degrees, all hell was likely to break loose. Well, such is life, sometimes. Why? You tell me. I haven't the foggiest. Yes, of course I am exaggerating, little shrink! I don't know what the angle was, precisely. Had I known, I would have taken a protractor to it. Anything to avoid the fighting, you know. Such a waste of time, and good breath.

So there I was, perpetually surrounded by these all-telling mirrors, not caring a bloody jot about how I looked. Hotel food is very interesting, you know that? Tonnes of fried chicken, sausages for breakfast, buttered rolls - you just had to pick up the phone and order room service. The child and I did precisely that, several times a day. It was all on the house. The child didn't put on weight. She was always on the go. I did. And enjoyed every moment of it.

Then along came the first girlfriend. I would like to think of her as the first of the seraglio but who knows if she was the first. Much younger than me, about 10 odd years I think, but my dotage was not established back then. Only the fat-age. Yes, sorry, corny, little shrink. So they used to work together in Delhi. He was her boss in a firm that had no firmness about romance on the job. Didn't I smell a rat? Amazingly, no. In fact, when she used to call the house, and he sat cocooned in the study for hours talking to her, I jokingly called her his girlfriend. Hey, the joke turned out to be on me. Did I catch them at it? Well, maybe there was phone sex, but I wasn't listening in, you know. Didn't I care that my now ex-ed-then-husband was spending hours on the phone talking to another woman? Of course not! Grow up, will you? It was the late twentieth century, for hell's sake! And he claimed to be talking about work. For hours? It should have set off an alarm or two. But the girl and I used to chat sometimes too. She was nice. Kind to the child. That sort of thing makes a difference to a woman. Let's shelter her name, shall we? After all, she meant no harm. The child used to call her Moniyanty in her endearing lisp.

Moniyanty and I got along famously at office parties. I suppose that too played a role in how I viewed the whole affair. I didn't fit into this corporate crappy conundrum and she would seek me out and chat with me through the whole sycophantic shindig. As the boss's wife, I was deeply uncomfortable, and she would sort of shield me from the rest of the gang by sticking to me limpet-fashion. Oh calm down! There's no need to feel this vicarious outrage. She was not a sycophant. She treated me with the same respect that I treated her.

The fun and games began in Bombay when she stayed at our place for a week. Ex and she would spend entire nights together in the study, "net-surfing" they said. Did I still not suspect anything? Dear god, you really are too young. My obvious charms had not faded even though both youth and beauty had bid farewell at five p.m.. At eighty-five kilos, I could still draw a crowd. Not that I wanted to, really. But I had come to the delightful conclusion that men will admire anything with boobs. Even lemon-sized ones. Did I care about my boobs becoming a synecdoche? I didn't give a rat's ass. The child was my life since I was not allowed to have a career. Yeah, "not allowed" by the constant battering soon after her birth that "one of us [had] to stay home and look after the baby". Since I couldn't make as much as he did in my job, it had to be me. We're a team, I was told. Someone earns and someone raises the child. Sure, caveman style. Nod away, little shrink. We feminist types will crumble too if constant and enough pressure is applied. Give up our autonomy. For love? Hah! For peace. And sanity. To just be left alone from the daily bloody battles over pulling apart the "team".

However, I stray, and your time will soon be up. Let's rewind then to the day I realised what was going on right under my proverbial (and pretty, if you will allow) nose. She was to leave later that day so I cooked lunch. Nothing much, Maggi with some veggies, the way I knew she liked it. When I went to the study to call them, I didn't knock. My mistake. Always knock when the better half is within with girlfriend. Trying to push open the door, it met with a solid object on the other side, and was pushed shut from within hurriedly. This time I did knock. Ex opened the door, looking flustered. Can you believe it, I still didn't get it. Come for lunch, I said. Moniyanty has a train to catch. Then I pushed the door open further and saw her. Disheveled hair, tears hastily wiped off her cheeks but still spilling out of her eyes, a reddening nose, and distress writ large. Need I say more?

I retreated, heart beating faster than a hammer on a coffin, set the table and brought out the food. We ate in silence. Silence is such a blessing, isn't it, when there is nothing, really, to say. I looked at her, twenty-something, looking nineteen, and I thought of myself, thirty-two going on fifty-five. There was, really, nothing to say.

Yes, I know, little shrink, the narrative from this point forth gets deadly boring. But find me five women out there who haven't gone through exactly the same thing, and I will show you five women who are in complete denial. This is the way of men and that is the way of women. You want me to go on? Why? Ah, this is not about the narrative in general but I need to vent.

It's been eighteen years but I still remember things clearer than yesterday. For some reason, I can't let it go.

When he returned from the station there was still nothing to say except, I think I will find another place to stay.

What, he thundered, brazening it out.

Oh, all right, I will say it then, if you are trying to deny it.

It was nothing, he responded. She's obsessing, I feel nothing for her.

Seriously? That's not what it looked like. Not from your face, anyway.

She's not going to do anything to hurt you, he said. She is deeply fond of you and the child.

Of course she is, I countered. I have always been nice to her, I added.

She's gone back to Delhi, and not coming back. I asked her to, but she said there was nothing in it for her. She said she can't hurt you.

Good for her, I supplied.

But why, I wanted to ask, desperately not wanting to hear the answer. Why did you... get involved with her, I wanted to know. Words that turned to icicles on my lips. I didn't have to ask.

Look at you, he said. You used to be charming, vibrant, beautiful, slim. You loved me. Now look at you. But more than that, I feel emasculated with you, by you. You're not satisfied with anything I do. I take pains to make your life as good as I possibly can but I fail. Each and every time. What do we even talk about, anymore? The kid? Your frustrations? You've even lost that wonderful laugh of yours.

Have you wondered what made me into this? No, of course not. Look at my life. Do I have one? I don't even have an identity anymore. I had a promising career. How many people do you know who jump from the bottom rung to third from the top in the space of three years? A career not advanced on my back, mind you! Built up with sheer hard work. From scratch. And what am I left with? Do you have any idea what it takes when someone asks me what I do to reply - Nothing. I am a housewife.

So it is not enough, he hollered. Not enough to have a beautiful child and a loving husband. That is what I mean. You have no respect for what you have. No regard for it. You don't look up to me for making a success of my career. And who did I do this for? You. And the child. I gave up what I was passionate about to make a career in this shitty corporate world. You think it was easy for me? But I did it. With the greatest ease.

Did I ask you to? I loved you when you were a nobody and a nothing, remember? I loved you for the passion you had for music. You were not a bloody slot machine to get things from but that's what you decided to become. I told you on the day you asked me to marry you that I never wanted to give up my career; did that not register in your self-focused head? You think we are a team? A team has more than one person in it who matters. How the hell are we a team if you are the only one who matters? Yours is the only opinion that counts.

Little shrink, what would you have done at this point? A point at which it would have made sense to walk away? I did. Well, I tried. I walked to the door only to be hauled back roughly. The next thing I knew I was on the floor, saved from smashing my gorgeous face on the floor by my arms.

It was the first time he was violent with me. There were other times but that will come in another story, I guess.

That was his experiment with youth. Not the only one, I must add. My experiments with youth were qualitatively different. I went to a nutritionist. From eighty-five down to fifty-eight in three months. Vigorous exercise, strict diet, supplements to keep up my strength and from a fifty-five-year-old body back to twenty-six. It was important to do this. Not for him. He could go to hell. It was important for me. Not that I had had body image issues. But it helped to see that there was something I could do to change a part of my life. Why was that so important? Why was it so important that I work on how I looked, little shrink? I don't have a straight answer to that one, I'm afraid. Could it be that of all the choices, that was the only one available? I mean I did try to look for a job. I got three offers - two at newspapers and one at a weekly magazine. They weren't ones I could juggle with the child's needs and schedules.

And in-between walks and other forms of exercise, I was hacking. Yes, I became an expert at hacking into his email to check if Moniyanty had written a love note to him. An expert at waiting up for him, crawling soundlessly to his phone to check for messages. When he went to Delhi on work, I would find out where he had stayed, call up the hotel and ask for his call records to be emailed to him. Go through them with a fine-tooth comb to see if he had called her, how often and for how long.

Isn't this a boring story for you, little shrink? One you have heard a hundred times before? Ah, no, you're not old enough to have heard it that often! I keep forgetting how young you are. But rest assured, in your long and hopefully fruitful career, ninety-nine out of a hundred women will recite the exact same story to you.

And what purpose did it all serve? Sometimes I found a crumb or two that told me he was lying through his teeth when he said he wasn't meeting her. It wasn't even enough to confront him with and when I did, all he would yell was that I was going on and on about a relationship that didn't exist. But.

It was a prison of insecurity and insanity that I was trapped in. Yes, my own mind had turned into a prison and I was a shackled to an unrelenting wall that I was repeatedly banging my head against. The mind can be the worst possible trap, you know, little shrink. It leads you up garden paths and into beautiful houses that turn out to be horrific nightmares. And I sank to the bottom from where there was no hope of ever rising again.

I did rise, I think. I couldn't leave it all behind, though. The lies, the deceit, they haunted me for the next seven years that we were together. They haunt me still. And coupled with the unending seraglio that followed closely on the footsteps of Moniyanty, the deceit did not let up till I let go. What he was looking for in them is still a mystery to me. But I got out. And when I did, I vowed to myself that I never, ever, would get into that particular trap again.

Oh yes, the psycho, of course. Talk about leaping from the frying pan straight into the fire! Let's not talk about that today, shall we?