I should have penned this much earlier. Was too caught up in the quagmire of my misunderstandings, snobbery and short temper to do so.

This is about a guy I didn’t know existed for the first 27 years of my life. When I met him for the first time (with determination to hate him right from the beginning) I found him too simple to be impressed with and at the same time too uncomplicated and unassuming to hate. He came across as a typical Bengali medium-educated bheto(literally means rice-eating, and here - boring; no offence meant, I’m as bheto as all true-blue Bengalis) Mamma’s boy with well-oiled hair (that too with a receded hairline), thick black specs and shirt not tucked in.

And that night I got probably the biggest surprise of my life when this introvert boy sent me an sms saying “it was a pleasure to meet you”. That was more than enough to impress me. I had never thought such a bashful (I thought of him as unsmart too) person could ever do such a thing.

That made me think. Think hard. And I decided that I should give this interaction a chance. Talking to a guy won’t get me married to him, after all.

Yes, he had come to check me out as his prospective match. And me being me (full of unjustified double standards), I had decided beforehand even before meeting him or seeing his photograph that I absolutely CANNOT like a guy who comes to meet me for negotiating an arranged marriage in this day and age, because I, who had obediently consented to her parents’ wish for her marriage being arranged, (albeit not gleefully) had dressed up for yet another “sitting”.

Gradually the number of sms’s increased, calls happened. Then the durations of those calls also started going up. We started going out on “dates”. On days when no date was scheduled he would plead me to come to the crossing in front of our house “for just 2 minutes” as he just wanted to see me once. This would irritate me to no end, as I could not understand why he was doing this. I could not believe that he could really fall in love with me in such a short span of time without knowing me well. I have never believed in love at first sight, you see. It was just about a year after I had my first ever relationship (which had lasted only 2 months) and break-up (which was extremely painful). My friends were at a loss about what to do with me as I had gone into a shell, and, after earning the moniker of chatterbox from our class teacher at the tender age of 4 and more than successfully living up to it for more than 2 decades, sometimes would not utter a single word during the course of an entire conversation.

I took it up just like playing a sport. I would silently listen to his romantic sweet nothings and when asked for a response would say something extremely vague and non-committal. I even had an eureka moment when I thought of the plan that unveiling my likes and dislikes would shoo him away, given that I was really fond of hard drinks, western attire, had lots of male friends and smoked occasionally too, whereas he stayed miles away from any form of addiction, absolutely hated smokers and came from an orthodox family.

But that didn’t work. He just listened to all of it and smiled, as if none of that mattered to him at all. This confused and irked me further.

Then came my birthday. He gifted me a really pretty wristwatch. I was even more surprised as I had totally underestimated his taste. Next Sunday, after my mom treated him to lunch (belated birthday celebration as nothing was possible on an office-day) happened my first visit to his place. His folks were really endearing people. I conversed at length with his mom whose sole joy lay in feeding everyone around her to her heart’s content, even if that meant the other person gets too full to eat for the next one year, lol. I found her to be sweet and really, really simple. His father and brother were all smiles. I am someone who’s not very fond of sweets. Yet I had to eat 5 different kinds of sweets that day as I had gone there just after my birthday and it was their family ritual (sigh!) to feed 5 different sweets to the birthday-boy/girl. Then he took me with him to show me around and talk in private. At some point of time in that evening an “ours only” moment was created which even my hypothyroidism would never allow me to forget for the rest of my life.

I was mad about sports, especially 3 of them – cricket, soccer and lawn tennis. He didn’t bother much about them. He was neither street smart nor suave or chivalrous. I loved good meaningful movies, even those arty ones – didn’t matter as long as they were in any of my 3 known languages. He liked only children’s movies or those of the mindless action genre or sci-fi. He had this hobby of keeping birds as pets. That also was a reason to not place him in my good books as I have always been against caging birds. Our only shared interest lay in travelling.

So our marriage happened. After a few days we went on our honeymoon – completely organized by him after zeroing in on the destination together. And there, amidst the beautiful snow-capped mountains of Kumaon I started falling in love with him. I realized I have never met a nicer man in my life. I had asked him what made him fall for me so badly. His reply stunned me. He had liked my picture. But during our first meeting after being prodded for long by relatives he uttered a few involuntary customary questions like education and hobbies, and after answering them with utter disgust in my mind I had sarcastically asked with a wry smile “Aar kichu jigyasyo ache (anything else u want to ask)?”, that blew him away. He fell head over heels in love with me. Weird, isn’t it?

He dealt with my tantrums and mood-swings as if they were child’s play. Whenever something upset me terribly I would find myself in absolute peace after I came home to him. I never wanted to stay overnight at my parental home, as I could not stand the thought of any form or length of separation from him.

Time flew by. It was almost 3 years after our marriage. Our child was about to enter our life. It was as if he wrapped me up in the softest of towels and placed me in the safest corner so that not a wee bit of inconvenience could touch me. Even then he called every hour from office to check if I was fine, happy, whether I was eating properly and on time. He provided me with unending supply of books from the staff recreation library in his office and I devoured them like crazy during those 9 months. We both wanted a girl badly and finally almost a year back finally we had one.

But after that a lot of things changed. Hormones surged in me after childbirth. Situations went out of control. I lost temper even faster than you could drop a hat. Created my own little hell-hole in my mind, became utterly irrational, too finicky and overprotective of my child and blamed him for anything or everything that could go wrong or actually went wrong. He would tolerate everything, and sometimes to pacify me would start stalking about some colourful species of pet fish or bird (which I have grown quite fond of by now after he got me acquainted with his own small world and made me understand that it’s not criminal to cage those birds as they only breed in captivity, and if set free will only get killed by crows or eagles) just to divert my attention to something pleasant. But he incurred more of my wrath that way. I thought he was shying away from facing the issue. I branded him as an escapist and hated him for that. I could also see his silent struggle to deal with it all and his blood sugar levels rising but could never hear a single word from him about it. Situations were not very conducive for us to discuss all the sensitive issues. Yet I tried, in the hope of resolution. He again turned away. I continued shouting at him, to no effect.

That got me thinking seriously. I had heard about his childhood a number of times from my mom-in-law. He had seen her being physically and verbally abused almost daily by his aunts, his father’s sisters. While his brother would stand up for their mother and protest, he would sit in a corner and look away. He had his own small world then too – around the pond, below a tree, playing the role of a moyra (a sweet shop owner) and tagging along his favourite cow (carved out of wood) by a rope inside the premises of their ancestral house in an obscure village in Howrah. It was not that he loved their mother any less, then why did he not protest? He did protest even when they abused him later (even after they loved him very much as an infant and a child) and accuse him of doing something he had not done or when their mother would beat him when actually his brother had committed the mischief and run away. I kept on wondering why.

I grew to realize that he could not decide whom to choose between his mother and his aunts, all of whom he loved dearly. He sought solace in his own imaginary world. Time and again he got raw deals from near and dear ones. That turned him into an introvert, essentially a loner, but thankfully not a recluse. That’s why he is not very good at expressing emotions, and on rare occasions he tries he makes a complete mess of it, lol . All this combined to make him a diabetic at this age. This realization made me so ashamed of myself that I wanted to apologise to him at once for my last few months’ behaviour. But he’s in office right now and cannot be disturbed.

So here it is, my darling – my tribute to you. Always stay nice, loveable and simple as you are. Don’t ever even think of giving up on me even if I become absolutely intolerable and insufferable. I need you by my side always.