Epilogue
Unlike most of you, I don't have the luxury of denial. I don't have the option of giving up and not seeing something through because it hurts too much. I do have power, but my brand of power is somewhat farcical with neither intentionality nor optionality. You are the ones who intend and pretend, while leaving it up to me to amend. Sometimes, it is fun to be me. I get to be everywhere, I get to really know you and everything about you - even the thoughts you don't let yourself think - and I get to see the entire picture at all times. I get to nudge your thoughts, infiltrate your dreams and steal your words. I get to define "random".
But most of the times, being me is hard. You are the one who gets to choose and decide. I am the one who has to follow through on your decisions and "get it done", no questions asked, even when your decision is simply not making one. You never think about me until the day you are in pain when you resort to blaming me, as if you had nothing to do with it all. And then, you forget again. Occasionally, you express gratefulness, but mostly, I get hateful allegations without a chance at defence. You ask me questions, but never care for the answers. I suppose I have learnt to live with all that, but what really irks me is when you don't respect me. You fight me all the time, and frankly I relish the battle, but it is when you get cocky and over-confident that you forget to be respectful that you really annoy me. That and when you give in without any fight whatsoever are the two things that I will always kick your butt for, I promise.
I suppose I like your habit of asking questions. Not just to me, but to yourself and to those around you. Asking brings you one step closer to understanding. Those of you who don't often wake up one day puzzled at your reflection in the mirror and conclude that I magically turned you into this person from whoever you used to be. That is really annoying. For better or for worse, what you see in the mirror is a reflection of your choices. But unlike me, you have a free will and a soul nobody can enslave. You can wake up one day and decide you don't like your reflection and start making different choices, and I will simply have to follow, no questions asked.
Believe it or not, I love you, all of you. Sometimes, some of you need more of my love and attention for small periods of time, but you are all my children and I want to see all of you happy and content. So when Maya decided she didn't like her reflection in the mirror, I helped her. She didn't like some of the choices she had made, or rather, she didn't like that she didn't make choices and take action at some moments when she should have. Nobody has power over love, including me, so I accept that. But you do have power over what you let love do to you. Does it strengthen you or make you insecure? Does it make you afraid, or does it give you courage? Does it make you selfish, or does it make you rise above self?
Maya concluded that her love had made her weak and afraid. It had made her forget the very things she lived by - friendship, honesty and respect. People say that love is blind, while in reality they use love as a cloak to pull over their eyes so they have an excuse to see only what they want to see. When Maya finally took off the cloak, she realized she had insulted her own precious love by wanting to possess something that wasn't hers. She realized that she had let the strife within herself fester because she had chosen to believe that she was the best for Rishabh. She wanted him to see it for himself and hence she waited, because of course she could never chose to knowingly manipulate him to make him see her truth. And yet, because she convinced herself that it was for Rishabh and not for herself that she was suffering through the wait, she couldn't see when her wait turned into an obsession that paralyzed her and tied her happiness to the idea of an imaginary future with Rishabh. I didn't think it was either right or wrong - I don't bother myself with judgments - but I did get annoyed when she would cry at nights unable to bear the anguish of seeing RK with Madhu and asked me "why me?". How about because you had been living in denial and had chosen to mistake the comfort of an affectionate friendship with Rishabh as a promise of a permanent refuge from the baggage of your past, madam? But she didn't ask any more questions, so she didn't understand then.
What started out as selflessness quickly turned into self-pity, which in turn became selfishness when she stumbled onto an awkward moment with an inebriated Rishabh. It was just a kiss and nobody would know was what she told herself. But she forgot that I know everything, and by then, it was time for her to face the consequences of her actions. People often call me sadist and allege that I lead them on before making them fall spectacularly, but I disagree. I didn't like seeing Maya suffer alone in her guilt. I didn't like her being slapped so openly by Rishabh's rejection and her friends' disgust. I didn't intend to punish her in any sort by pushing her into darkness. In fact, as I said before, I don't even have the luxury of intentionality. What happened to Maya was just a natural consequence of her own choices, and those of others around her. Having said that, I do feel some sympathy for her because the one choice nobody has is falling in love. And part of her predicament was a result of her love. So, I decided to make it upto her last month when her car broke down and I sent Avinash to her rescue. Avinash is her mother's best friend's son, and both Maya and Avinash were good friends in middle school, before Maya's parents moved to Delhi. Over the years, they lost touch, but unknown to them, they were each other's first crush. I can't really say if anything would happen between them, but I do know that Rishabh's forgiveness and Avinash's friendship has brought happiness back into Maya's life.
Yes, Rishabh did forgive Maya. I think my respect for him increased when he did that, putting his feelings of hurt and betrayal aside. He did suffer a lot as a consequence of choices he did not make and feelings that he did not know about at the hands of both Madhu and Maya, people he had really trusted. But without his knowing, his trust had turned into a whole list of unspoken assumptions he made about the relationships in his life and blinded him to the extent that he did not make any choices when he needed. Relationships need constant nurturing, and I feel a little sorry for Rishabh that he learnt this simple lesson of life in a rather harsh way. I don't know if he deserved it, but there were times when he definitely made me mad by his failure to appreciate what he had in life. He didn't know how safe he had felt in the envelope of his mother's love until the day she disowned him for hurting Madhu. He didn't know how much he depended on his friends including Madhu to ask the right questions and comprehend life's challenges, until the day he had nobody by his side. Ignorance may be bliss, and that kind of innocence may even be cute, but only until the day it no longer is. Even if standing by your choices seem scary - like it did to Rohan and Ria when they stood against their best friends for what they believed were the right reasons or to Vikram when he tried showing his friend the mirror - you have to do it, because not choosing like Rishabh only takes you so far.
The funny thing is, he has always, unambiguously loved Madhu, even before she confessed her feelings to him. But he had to lose her to understand that and his own feelings. They say if you don't set your priorities in life, someone else will set them from you. For the longest time, Rishabh didn't bother with prioritizing, because everything on the menu was great - loving parents, true caring friends, a wonderful career and a lover and wife who loved him more than anything else. He kept ordering the combo platter, so to speak, without knowing when he started to take more than he was giving to his relationships. He never intentionally hurt Madhu, in fact he always intended to protect her and keep her happy. Yet, he didn't bother to probe what made Madhu happy, or unhappy. He didn't bother to worry why Madhu was friends with everyone except Maya. He didn't bother to remember to ask Madhu - or even Maya - to explain their pregnant silences and half-said words when time interrupted their completion. Most of all, he forgot that change is a constant and everything evolves and therefore, he did not know when the nature of his friendship evolved in a direction he had not imagined or wanted, or when his relationship with Madhu evolved and deepened.
Still, I don't think I would have cared about him living in his happy-go-lucky world if that hadn't led to Madhu breaking down over and over. Madhu was my special child for a long time. I had witnessed innumerable tears shed by her hiding in her pillow every night since she was a toddler. I knew the taste of rejection in her mouth when her mother turned away from her and the bitterness of her lonely childhood that she spent chasing everything she believed would make her worth existing and being accepted by those around her. As a child, she suffered the consequences of a choice that she had not made and that is why I felt a need to protect her. The one difference with Maya - when Madhu asked me "why me?" she also asked me what she could do to survive her anguish and come out stronger. So I gave her tools to protect herself, become independent and break the cycle of pain, which she did use fairly well. However, much to my anxiety, she fell in love as well. Not just in love, but devastating, all-consuming love that inundated every deprived cell in her body with passion. She got happiness, but unfortunately, she was so unfamiliar with happiness she didn't believe it would stay. She gave in to fear and put herself below everything she thought she needed to do to make the happiness stay just a little bit longer. She, too, was being selfless somewhat in the same way as Maya, but the difference was that while Maya thought she was acting in Rishabh's best interest and succumbed to self-pity and selfishness, Madhu tried so hard to be unselfish that she lost her self-esteem. She never really knew how to ask for something she wanted, but now she actually started believing that anything she wanted wasn't really worth wanting and anything she had, she didn't deserve. It's tempting to blame Rishabh for not knowing or asking where Madhu's happiness lay, but the truth is Madhu wasn't really sure where her own happiness lay and lived off the reflection of what she believed made Rishabh happy. All this would have been poetic had it not been so tragic and watching Madhu's fragile self shatter into pieces broke my heart.
In fact, I really believed, for a long time, that Rishabh was not right for Madhu who needed to be healed by someone who actually and actively chose her. That's why I gave her a friend like Vikram to give her independent perspective and prove to her that she was valuable and lovable. That's why I pushed her towards Ria, who has always believed in saying exactly what she feels, so Madhu could learn from her. That's why I let Madhu walk into traps of pain in her relationship with Rishabh hoping she would build up the courage to rebel and speak up. I wanted Madhu to fight, but the silly girl kept walking out of every confrontation with Rishabh with a gratuitous apology and saved all her fights for me. I thought I succeeded when I watched Madhu drown in grief - trust me, I was watching her like a hawk and wouldn't have let her go too far - making her believe her relationship was over. But then first Rishabh and then Madhu really trumped me. They chose to be together, but they didn't really change all their choices about how they lived together. It was that what led to their eventual separation, not some heartless pursuit of revenge at my end. I was furious, but really, just like everything else, I have no powers to inflict pain or extract revenge either. Rishabh and Madhu had all the power to strengthen and nurture their marriage, but Madhu had let herself become a scared coward that she really was not, and Rishabh did not see the trust deficit between them until it was too late. What happened next was inevitable, in some ways, but I wish it didn't have to be so painful. I wish life was like water, so that when it spilled all over, it at least followed the shortest path to get from point A to B, instead of a tumultuous agonizing path that choked its inhabitants.
I suppose the one thing I have to give Rishabh credit for is that he always gets the big moments and the hard decisions right. The most testing moments where most human beings fail or give up are the ones he always aces. Maybe that is why he is the perfect life partner for Madhu, providing strength when she needs it the most. I will confess I was too stubborn to acknowledge this for very long, but when I saw Rishabh overcome his abject defeat and helplessness, find Madhu and steadfastly refuse to be pushed away by her, I had to admit it. He was the only one who could have made Madhu leap over the self-created walls of unspoken feelings she was stuck behind, and he did it. He was the only one who could have liberated Madhu of her past and truly embrace the future. I have to agree with Madhu on this - Rishabh really taught her to live, and she really taught him to love.
Anyway, I guess all's well that ends well. Madhu is no longer my most favored child. She is too busy showering her love on her husband and her little angel to think about me anyway. Instead, my attention these days is at another girl, also, coincidentally, named Madhu, but very different from our Madhu. Would you want to know her story?
So, before we flip pages, I want to put this happy picture of Rishabh, Madhu, Seher, Rohan, Ria, Trishna, Maya, Vikram and Aarohi on my treasured wall of memoirs so I don't forget the lessons of love and friendship their beautiful lives have reminded me. Oh, see, I forgot to tell you about Seher's Godmother and Vikram's soon-to-be-bride Aarohi as well, who he fell head over heels in love with a year ago. But we have run out of time, and the other Madhu needs my attention. So I am going to leave you with this - words are powerful, both spoken and unspoken. Use them well.
-Until next time,
Your unloved Destiny
P.S. Mr. Love, you win again. But don't gloat too much. I will see you in another round, in another battle, soon enough! Some day, I will beat you. Or not 😊😊
Edited by teekay - 11 years ago
Bollywood
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
