Maryada: Vidya-Gaurav FF - Updates. p. 145 (6/29) - Page 14

Originally posted by: Calliope

Gaurav here is a man who doesn't make decisions in an instant. Implicitly I would deduce that he is also the man who doesn't jump to conclusions by heresy or by the nominal social standards. His perspective of Salome would be vastly different from a salary man who falls well with in the bracket of mundane.

But what's more intriguing is, how did the two end up meeting anyway? They belong to opposite spectrum of the society in truest sense. So, how?

Oh Devi, where art thou? 😆

Originally posted by: saomom

While I really want to love Guarav (like I do Maan, Shiv or <sigh>John 😆) I'm frustrated by him. While he is being understanding and caring of Vidya, it seems he is playing the part of nice husband. What is going to happen to Vidya when she finds out that hubby has been with Salome? That's not a minor thing like leaving the toilet seat up or your socks on the floor. While he is worried about his family being crazy in front of her, shouldn't he should look to himself and his behavior first?

To me, it's kinda like this: Hi, I'm Guarav your new husband. My father is mean/abusive/awful and will go after you as soon as he feels I don't care for you. My mom is abused/doormat/manipulative etc and puts up with everything because she doesn't know what else to do and she's scared to death of my dad. My uncle beats the crap out of my aunt, as you have seen, but no worries, it happens all the time- you'll get used to it. Oh, and me? I think I'm in love with the local prostitute who I've been seeing for the past three years. I'll do the best I can to protect you. Welcome to the family!

Maybe I'm just to black and white. Devi? We still friends?

Chapter 16: The Mother of All Evils

"If I refrain from sleeping with you, I would think that it would make you happy." He looked at what he had written and then erased it. She would take it the wrong way. Sex was always a subject of contention, for obvious reasons. She relied on it both to celebrate and denigrate love depending on her mood. If he could not be privy to the subtle changes in her expressions beforehand, he would not know what her mood exactly was, which would then lead to emotional meltdowns when he miscalculated.

"Sex is the last thing that should determine whether I love you or not. So I fail to see exactly what it would prove even if we do not share physical intimacy given the change in my circumstances." He hit send before he changed his mind yet again. This was only the 11^th reply that he had erased and retyped.

Vidya walked into the room from the bathroom changed into another one of her cotton saris that she always wore. He had noticed that she did not know how to make the pleats correctly and they were always a bit crooked. He had meant to ask his mother to help her but had forgotten.

Today was her first day of coaching classes for the entrance exam that she would have to take in a few months to join the Master's program and he smiled at the level of excitement that she was trying to keep under the lid. He was sure that she had been bored sitting at home for the past week as she went through the course catalogues of all the universities and local colleges around before finally deciding on several programs that she wanted to apply to and then telling him about going for coaching.

His cell phone rang just then and he picked up when he noticed that it was from his office. He had been back at the office for a week now and was still working overtime to make up for the amount of work that had piled up in his absence. As he listened to Vikash, one of his full-time staff, give him the details of the contract for a new major client, he gestured for Vidya to come closer. When she was near him, he gestured towards her sari pleats and she looked down in confusion. He pulled the pleats out and she looked up at him in surprise and he shook his head with a laugh.

"What, sir?" He heard Vikash ask at the other end of the line.

"Oh nothing Vikash. Sorry about that. Continue."

Meanwhile, he gestured for her to watch as he showed her how to make the pleats properly and unraveled it again when he was done to give it back to her so that she could do it herself. She looked up at him in wonder – he was sure that she wanted to know where he had learned to wrap a sari on a woman – and then raised an eyebrow in question. He wiggled his eyebrows back at her, letting her know that it was his secret. She smiled and took the sari back as she replicated his pleating process and when she was done and was about to tuck it in the same way she always did, he stopped her and gestured to do it the other way. She did and then looked up in surprise that it was something so simple that made all the difference in how neatly the pleats lay against the rest of her sari. He smiled in amusement and asked her to get ready quickly.

"That's alright Vikash. I will take a look at it when I get to the office." He ended the call and turned to see her carrying what looked like notebooks.

"Vidya, you have 4 hours of tutoring. Wouldn't you rather type?" he asked just as he was reminded that she did not have a laptop. He would have to get her one. Wait, but…

"Wait, do you know how to type?" .

She nodded but then said, "Why can't I write? Four hours is not too much."

"You can use one of my old laptops. You know how to use Microsoft Word, right?"

She nodded and he went to his attached office to bring back one of the few laptops that had been collecting there that he no longer used. She shook her head when she saw it and said, "no, no... that looks expensive. I am really alright with taking notes. I have been doing it this way forever."

"Well, then it's time to change with the times, isn't it?" He turned on his laptop and made sure that he could open Word and then gave it to her with its charger.

"You are really being too nice." She said as she took the laptop from him.

He paused and looked at her. "You think so? Really? Should I be less nice?"

She nodded in seriousness and he was caught off guard and stared at her. And just when he thought it was different this time and that she was not being funny, it appeared slowly… her smile that came on incrementally before it turned into a full laugh.

"Do you know that your humor is not odd at all? It's wicked, scandalous even." He said without smiling.

Her smile disappeared quickly and she pursed her lips as she looked at him with the same expression that he had look at her earlier, trying to figure out if he was going to laugh.

For that reason, he held off longer than usual and just as she blinked her eyes rapidly in that way that he was starting to realize denoted embarrassment, he finally gave in and laughed.

She didn't join him right away and he knew that he had disconcerted her truly. "Oh come on, Vidya. I was just kidding. But at least you won't think I am too nice now."

This time she smiled and said, "yes, yes… keeping me on my toes. I think I have gotten so used to people not really understanding my sense of humor. Or even if they do get it, they usually don't know how to tease me back the same way. So, this is just new with you, that's all."

He thought of telling her that he never laughed with anyone else like he did with her. But that was an admission that felt private and somehow intimate and he did not want that. He did not want any self-consciousness on either of their part and he had found out that the best way to muck up something was to acknowledge that it was actually happening and thus calling attention to it. He was almost normal with Vidya… he was not overly serious or overly melancholic or any of those things that he knew was his standard reputation. It helped that she knew almost nothing else about him. And he wanted to hold onto this way of being with another human being for as long as it would last…

And thus, he just smiled at what she said and asked her if she was ready to go.

Just as he dropped her off at the coaching center and was about to turn out of the parking lot, his phone beeped.

The text was just one line, "Are you sleeping with her?"

He closed his eyes with a sigh. He knew that she knew that he was not. But she wanted him to feel what she felt and so he replied,

"You know the answer to that question, but I will answer you anyways. No, I am not sleeping with my wife. I am not sleeping with anyone. In fact, I am starting to think that an oath of celibacy may do me some good. It won't be that hard, Salome. You know better than most that sex is just a physical activity. It's not a requirement for living or loving."

By the time he reached his office, he had received a return text from her.

"Do I sound needy and bitter, Gaurav? I think I do. You'll have to excuse me this once. I am a little stressed after this last journey. I went away to retrieve someone. My mother… she has returned finally. I don't really know if this is a good thing at all. But there are some crosses that everyone has to bear for life. She is mine just as your father is yours."

----------------------------

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."

------------------------