Dear Sameer,
I absolutely hate you. Here I thought I am the most romantic person in the world and my parents beat my smugness out of me. I found few old letters today when I was fumbling with something in Dad's study. Oh alright, I was fumbling with his huge collection of news clips. Yes, I still am going ahead with my project of writing about how a common man would with all his struggles and normalcy in life, can become more than just a normal person by the tremendous work he had done.
You, I and everyone else know about who that person would be. It is my father of course. I know you think I am too full of myself and my Dad. I know you snort about we Khuranas being self obsessed and all that. That was the precise reason why I didn't tell you about it and simply went ahead to smuggle and snoop around in my own home, and accidentally knocked down an old folder with few notes, and something caught my attention there. An elegant cursive smooth writing by black fountain ink pen which was unmistakably my mom's.
It was a letter written ages ago, before she was married. She wrote it to her future husband that came into her life three years after she wrote that letter. I have always seen my mother to be an amazing person, with her heart full of love, and a smile that never left her lips. For us, she had always been that complete woman, who was content and happy with life. Reading that letter changed a lot of things.
It told me about her insecurities, her thoughts, fears, and so many things and knowing that it was my mother writing the letter, and identifying few blotches of ink spread here and there in the letter made me weep like a baby. I want to hold that woman, tell her that everything is going to be alright. If I were there in that day and age, I would have even given her what she had wanted.
Freedom.
I would have given her the ticket to her happiness; of travelling the world. I would have sent her away from responsibilities, and that uncertain thing called marriage.
I know I am being entirely bullish and saying things which would be a threat to my own survival. Of course I am glad that she never left the home, and that she married the man she did. But you get the drift of my thoughts right? I was being a fellow woman when I wanted my mom to choose her happiness.
I shuffled through the folder to find more, something more. I wanted a closure, the letter needs a closure Sameer. Looking at my mom today, I know she had crossed that state, lived a complete & happy life but I wanted to know the journey, and I did get my answers when I found a letter with an elegant scrawl. With thumping heart I started reading it, as I recognized it to be my father's.
If my mom's letter teared me up, this letter made me sob like a baby. No, there was nothing depressing about it, in fact it was so beautifully written that I want to go jump in the letter and hug these two.
Sameer, what love really is?
This was a question everyone would have asked themselves sometime or the other. Each will have their own definition too.
After reading the letters Sameer, I now know what love is.
Love lied in my mom's acceptance of getting married, my Dad's support at every step to the woman who walked into his life; his gesture of replying to her insecurities.
A man might have to choose between his mother and wife at times, I was told. And my father had not chosen one among them but loved both. He hoped his wife to understand and accept his family as is, and supported her at the expense of being called wife's puppet.
He was a person who got jealous of book's protagonists (how cute is that! Can I pull his cheeks?) and who would flex his muscles to show off to his wife. I think I had fallen head over heels in love for these two somewhere along the course of reading the letters.
I had always been proud of my father Sameer, to the extent of hero worshipping him. He always credited his success to my mother and I found that sweet but today when I read how she supported him when no one did, at the start of his business, and can see how both of them completed each other, healing, loving, caring, I have tears in my eyes.
If it was hero worshipping before, now it is fan girling to this couple. What a couple these are!
And now you young man, who happens to claim yourself as a person who would like a crazy head like me despite of my whacky brain (such a rewarding attributes you associate me with Sameer. I am highly humbled. Yes, pun intended) have to prove it. You ought to write a reply to this letter and it better be as romantic as my parent's if not more. They had set a standard and my love, you have to cross it to pass this test. Forget about you coming to meet my father to talk to him about us, you got to impress me first. Your time starts now.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Sincerely,
Proud daughter of Mr. Maan Singh Khurana and Mrs. Geet Handa Khurana
Cricket
Indian Mythology
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