Tell Me, Is This What They Call ‘Love'….?

I am in Bangalore. It’s a lovely city with cool breezes, coconut trees and cute cafes on cobbled streets and I am totally enamored. I am here to attend a wedding, the wedding of the daughter of a very senior colleague of mine. This colleague Dr V, a warm-hearted, big-souled, easygoing gentleman was the kind of senior you turned to for guidance and for help, secure in the knowledge that he would never turn you back empty-handed. He was also the kind of person you could be at complete ease with, without constantly feeling conscious of his age and seniority. In short, he was very dear to both of us, very dear and much respected. 
You must have noticed that I said ‘was’. Well, about five years back he was suddenly taken ill while at work and succumbed to the illness within a very short time. We were devastated, both Other Half and me when we got the news and I cannot even begin to try to understand the shock and pain his family must have gone through. Over the years, we stayed in touch with his family, his wife the charming Mrs V, his daughter, son and elderly mother and so when Mrs V invited me to this wedding planned in August this year, I knew that I had to go.  

I reach the wedding venue in the evening (they are called Kalyana Manthapas all over South India) and am greeted by Mrs V with a warmth that is very typical of her. After meeting the bride and the groom, both looking resplendent in their traditional dress, I settle down comfortably in a chair in the very first row of the hall and indulge in my favourite pastime of ‘people watching’.

I watch Mrs V as she moves around busily, overseeing arrangements and greeting guests. She looks elegant, dressed simply in a flame coloured traditional South Indian silk sari with a large leather bag clutched to her shoulders from which she occasionally extracts a cheque book and writes out cheques. I marvel at how difficult it must have been for her, all alone, to organize this huge wedding with nearly five hundred guests, some of them old, orthodox and rather cantankerous and that too in city as expensive as Bangalore. Her son, still at college, is too young to be of any real help and I know she must have done it all by herself. Though she is smiling brightly and even laughing occasionally at some family joke, I can see the shreds of worry and exhaustion shadow her eyes.

I am sitting with a colleague of Mrs V’s and on spotting us, she calls us over for a family photograph with the bride and the groom. When the photography is done, I stand with her for a moment before the wedding mandap. It is done up beautifully with silk curtains, fresh flowers and shimmering gold festoons. As we gaze at it in silence, each immersed in her own thoughts, Mrs V suddenly puts an arm around me and with her free hand pointing briefly to the garlanded photograph of Dr V placed in the front of the Mandap, says softly, “Aibee, see V is also there with us…!”

She looks at me straight in the eye as she says this and for that instant, I see all the anxiety and the exhaustion melt away. As a radiant smile lights up her face, she looks for a moment very young and very beautiful, just like a bride herself…..Tears unbidden prickle my eyes and embarrassed, I look away. When I turn my gaze back to Mrs V, the caterer has already claimed her attention and the magic is gone.

And I find myself wondering, “Is this what they call Love?”

            I am sitting at the swanky departure lounge of the royal sounding Kempe Gowda International Airport of Bangalore. With Mimie having chewed off my IPad headphones and having forgotten to bring my reading glasses, I have nothing to read and no music to listen to. And once again with nothing to do, I fall back on that one thing I am really good at and that is people watching.

            The departure lounge is teeming with people and with males outnumbering females, logically I should be having good fodder for my past time. But sadly the male of the species, at least the Indian variety, seems to have degenerated in quality over the past decade. Take the young men for example. These modern day chaps with cigarette pants slung at levels even lower than their glutei, weird pointy shoes and hair gelled to stand up like the scales on the back of a Stegosaurus rex don’t interest me a tiny bit. The older men are worse. With gargantuan pot bellies spilling over their belts, sparse hair dyed black as sin and pudgy fingers adorned with millions of ‘Baba’ advised rings, they are a nightmare for delicate minded people watchers’ like me. And so I am left with only the women to gaze at. And this I do happily, checking out their dimensions, clothes, hairstyles and makeup with a meticulousness that would make even the seasoned male voyeur proud.

            I am sitting on the aisle side chair of a set of three chairs. The chairs next to me are occupied by an elderly couple, probably past their seventies. The man sits next to me while his wife sits at the other end. The man, judging from his posture, movement and speech has probably suffered a brain stroke (a CVA for the doctors amongst my readers). Though he seems able to walk and talk without assistance, his movements are staccato and his speech slurred. And later I realize that he also has a degree of dementia; which is either a part of his illness or a result of the normal process of aging. They appear well off, with diamonds twinkling in the woman’s ears, nose, throat and wrists. She is probably younger to him by five or six years, healthy and capable of looking after herself, inspite of her advanced years.

            I am fiddling around with my phone, forwarding inane WhatsApp messages to all and sundry and when there are no more messages left in my kitty, sending meaningless Emojis to Other Half simply to annoy him. Suddenly, the man says something to me. But his speech is garbled and I cannot understand what he says. I look up and I see the woman gently turn the man’s head away towards her side. He does this again and then again and each time he looks at me and says something, she gently but firmly turns him away from me. But the man is restless, itching for something to do. So he stands up suddenly and it seems he wants to go stand in the queue. She holds his hand and pulls him back to his seat saying, “Abhi aap kahan jaoge. Baitho thoda yehan.”

But he is difficult to convince and to control. After a minute, he stands up again and tries to walk to the queues. Again she brings him back gently to his seat. He does this repeatedly and each time she dissuades him quietly and gently. He leaves his seat almost ten to fifteen times in that short duration but she never loses her patience, never raises her voice, never changes her gentle tone. Sitting next to him I find myself losing patience, getting irritated with that constant getting up and sitting down, that garbled hoarse voice I cannot decipher. But the woman is unmoved in her gentleness. Finally she takes the man’s left hand and tenderly envelops it in both her palms, smiling softly at him as she looks at his face. This somehow seems to calm him. He sits quietly for the next five ten minutes. By now the queue to board their flight is moving rapidly and so the woman says, “Chaliye chalte hain.” The man stands up happily and waits for the woman to gather their handbags together. She slings the bags on her left shoulder, grasps his left hand firmly in her right and then very carefully, very lovingly, like a mother with an errant toddler, leads her husband slowly towards the queue.

And once again, I find myself wondering, “Is this what they call Love?”

PS:
1. I usually write on weekends as its less rushed. But for this post, I had the feeling that if I waited for the weekend, the memory of the emotions would have faded by then. As it is, had I penned the words at the wedding venue and the airport itself, I feel I would have done a much better job. 
2. Be nice and do give a feedback ; even if you are one of my diehard 'Walls', old or new.....