Chapter 17 – The Paradox of Infinity
She found it two weeks later.
She had been using Gaurav's laptop for all that time and had been doing a bit of exploration on it, becoming familiar with the other programs aside from Word. There were very few saved files on his computer and whatever was still leftover seemed to be old drafts. But then there was one folder that was titled 'Untitled' and she opened it to see what it was.
The folder contained exactly eleven files and there were all pictures of the same woman… a very beautiful woman… she looked regal and sophisticated in the first two pictures and reminded her a bit of the old actress Nutan. The last nine were quite different… she was sitting on a chaise by the window and looking out, leaning on one hand under her chin. The first few were in profile, starting from far away and getting closer to her with each successive picture, until the fourth one when her face fully turned to the camera, startled to find that she was being photographed. By the sixth one, she had her hand up, first trying to block the camera and then her face. The last two were of her having given up hiding and looking straight into the camera with a slight smile… it was evident in them that the woman was in love with whoever took the photographs. She looked at the dates of the file and saw that they were only a year and half old.
She had known, she discovered then... Somewhere deep inside her, she had known that her husband was in love with another woman. She just hadn't thought that she would find proof of it so soon. She remembered what she thought of him that first day when he had helped her onto the train and she had seen him up close for the first time. She had wondered then what was wrong with him. Why they had thought to find him a girl from a village who would not suit him, why he had appeared to have an air of gloom around him… and of course it explained why he never slept in the same bed with her, why he treated her the way that he did… with the gentleness and distance of a growing friendship rather than attraction… and however a man would act if he felt that… she imagined that he would take pictures of the woman during their stolen moments and save it on his computer…
She wondered whether she was attracted to her husband… she honestly didn't know…. Aside from the occasional Amir Khan adoration and acknowledging several of her classmates as being good looking, she had never really felt what her friends called attraction for anyone real. And from their accounts, it had seemed as if their hearts raced whenever the boy came around or their face flushed or any number of those things that she had never felt. And she did not feel them now with her husband either. Maybe there was something wrong with her… she briefly pondered this possibility, but then thought that it was a good thing that she had found out now rather than later that her husband's affections lay elsewhere. At least, now she knew that she shouldn't become attracted to him or fall in love with him even if she was capable of those things. She wondered why he hadn't married this woman. And she wondered if he still had any relationship with her…
What did a woman do in such circumstances? How often did this happen in arranged marriages? She could only imagine that it happened more frequently than not… Despite what they showed in movies – people didn't move on from their feelings just because they got married. She had always found it funny whenever she heard corny lines that married women said about previous relationships like, "I stopped loving him the day I married you" How true were the woman's feelings to begin with then… or in her husband's case, the man's, if he could move on from a previous love that quickly… but that still didn't answer her questions. What was she to do now? She couldn't let him know that she knew… if he had wanted her to know, then he would have shared it with her already…
She closed the files and the folder and just as she closed the laptop and stood up from the table, the door to their room opened and he came in. He smiled when he saw her and motioned to the laptop with his head as he asked, "Finished your work already?"
She smiled back at him, finding that what she knew now strangely did not change her feelings for him… whatever she felt for him was so new and still so unformed that it didn't have much room to change yet… he was still the same man that she had known for the past month… she just understood him a little better now… just a little… so maybe they won't have a typical marriage like many others… but what was a typical marriage anyways? Was it the like that of Uttara maasi who married for love and whose husband now thought it was alright to get drunk and abuse her in public? Was it like her mother-in-law whose husband seemed to not care one whit about the lengths that she went to to take care of his home and please him? In comparison, her own husband at least seemed to respect her and treat her as an equal.
She thought of her parents and her chaachis and maasis and all the other marriages that she knew of… there were times when both arranged and love marriages worked out… and when they both did not… she thought the whole business was like buying a lottery ticket… you always hoped you would win, but also knew that maybe you were just wasting your money…
"You look deep in thought. Is something wrong?" She heard him ask and looked up him, shaking her head with a smile.
"No no… I was just thinking about infinity. You know what infinity is, in mathematical terms?" she asked now.
He thought of it for a moment and then said, "Hmm.. beyond an assigned value?"
She nodded and then asked, "Have you heard of the paradox of Hilbert's hotel?"
He shook his head as he loosened his tie and came to sit on the bed.
"Alright, it goes like this. Hilbert's hotel has an infinite number of rooms and just as many guests."
He nodded as he took off his suit jacket.
"Now imagine that every room is occupied and a new guest arrives. Would he or she have a room available?"
He thought of that for a moment and unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. "Hmm… yes… and no… it is full, but there are infinite rooms…"
"Suppose, a hotel had 30 rooms and there were 30 guests and another came, then the guests would make 31, which is one more than the number of rooms." She said and he nodded, asking her to continue.
"Now, if there are infinite numbers of rooms and another guest arrives and you do the math – that's infinity plus one and the answer is still…"
"Infinity…" he answered.
"Exactly… that's the paradox… the hotel is full, yet there are always infinite vacancies at the Hilbert's hotel."
He ran his fingers through his curly hair as he gave a short laugh and said, "I think my brain just short-circuited."
She smiled now, "Yea, so that's what I was thinking about… infinity…"
"What brought that on?" He asked.
She looked up at him with a nervous laugh, "I have no idea…"
He smiled at her answer. "Well, I thought I was full, but now I am famished… Have you eaten dinner?"
She nodded; he had come late from work and she had eaten earlier at Devyani's insistence thinking that he would be much later than this.
He looked a little disappointed and so she said, "But I have room for something sweet."
He brightened now as he straightened and said, "I will change and come right out."
Indian Idol 15
