Blank Pages

Blank Pages! He stared down at them with the unaccustomed weight of a pen in his hands wondering desolately whether he had the words to get his life back. Geeta’s face appeared, obscuring the pages, with the icy far-away look that had made him feel an outcast far more than any words could have done. Remembering the way her face, posture and tone of voice had made him feel the last time he saw her, he despaired of any chance of reconciliation with her.At that time all he had felt was anger at the betrayal of his beliefs and had felt that her departure from his life would make little impact on him. He had not been prepared for the feeling of vacuum in his heart or for the fact that he could find no savor in all the things that he had, till then, enjoyed. His pride would still have stood in the way of approaching her for reconciliation but last week’s incident had upset all his notions.So, here he was staring down at these blank pages trying to find the words that would bring Geeta back to him. His calls had gone unattended; his SMSes ignored and emails probably deleted unseen. His only chance now was that a letter from him would get her attention. * * * * * *He could still recollect his early days after his marriage to Geeta. She was not a raving beauty but her eyes were lovely and, when she smiled, her whole face lit up with irresistible charm. She smiled often those days and was so accommodating then that he still had difficulty in reconciling to the fact that she could have become so aloof to him in the five odd years of marriage.On their honeymoon, he had presented her with a red salwar-kameez. Her eyes had looked at him with so much affection that his heart had turned over. Then she said softly, “This is a lovely present, Ajay! My favorite color is blue, however. Would it be possible to exchange this?”“I love red, Geeta! Blue is such an insipid color. Please get used to wearing red”, he had said. Her eyes showed hurt for a moment. Then, she had smiled brilliantly and said, “Ok!”Even though theirs had been an arranged marriage, Geeta seemed to have so much affection for him even in the initial days that she would do anything to please him. It was not as though she was financially dependent on him considering that she was a banker as he was and they worked at almost coeval positions.In fact, looking back, he could hardly remember her wearing blue dresses in the five years of their married life. It was still surprising to him that such an accommodating person had turned so adamantine in a short span of five years.* * * * * *The initial days after marriage and the process of settling into a new routine are normally turbulent especially when it comes to a working couple. He had not found it very difficult, however. They had, somehow, settled in remarkably well very soon. Now, in retrospect, it seemed to him that it was Geeta’s soft-spoken and generous nature that ensured the achievement of the equilibrium with little acrimony. He did help her around the house but, now that he saw those days with more clarity, whenever there was something disputatious it had been Geeta who had given way with grace.Food had, however, been a problem. Neither of them was too fond of eating out and, thus, Geeta had taken over the cooking but her idea of food was too chilli-laden for his bland tastes.“God! You are expected to add chillies to the vegetables not vegetables to the chillies”“I’m sorry, Ajay! At my home, we eat food as hot as this.”“You are no longer at your parents’ place, Geeta! Please make something edible for me”It took about three months before the food became palatable to him. Till then the dining table had been a battlefield from where Geeta had invariably retreated in tears. He had soothed away her hurt in the night but it was only after she had learned to cook blandly enough that the house had turned peaceful.* * * * * *Life had gone on with relatively little friction for the next five years. True, there had been disputes when Geeta put her office responsibilities above their commitments to his family. Initially she, at least, used to apologize and try to give her flimsy reasons for not being able to come to his cousin’s wedding or his nephew’s first birthday. Lately she had taken to listening to his righteous anger in meek silence but did not change her ways. That was the only fly in the ointment as far as his marital life was concerned.The bombshell when it fell was totally unexpected. Geeta had got a coveted posting inUK from her bank and came home excited about it.“You refused the posting, didn’t you?” said he, confidently.“Why would I?”“How can you shift to London when I am working in Mumbai?”“You can find a job in London, can’t you?”“I am doing very well in this bank now and can expect to reach the top. How can I jeopardize all that? You go over tomorrow and tell your office that you cannot take up this posting.”Geeta was silent. He was sure that she would refuse the posting the next day. It had been a long tiring day for him and he went to sleep almost immediately after.The next day he came back from his bank and found Geeta all packed up.“Ajay! I am moving to my parent’s place right now. I have taken up my posting and will be leaving for London within a month.”“What?? Geeta! What do you mean?”“Listen, Ajay! I have not been happy in this marital life of ours for quite some time now. I am not sacrificing my career merely in order to live the sort of frustrating life that I have been leading till now.”“What do you mean not happy? I have been helping you around the house, putting up with your entire obsession with your office and giving you a decent lifestyle. What do you think anyone else would do better than me?”Geeta flared up. “Helping me around the house? Putting up with my obsession? Nothing that the two of us did around the house was our job with you, was it? It was mine and when you did something you were magnanimously helping me out. You never stopped to think about what makes me happy, either. You never bothered to ask me how I felt about the life we were leading or what sort of lifestyle I would have wanted to lead. Don’t talk to me about how good a husband you have been to me!”“Ha! So if you think you can find someone better than me go right ahead.” he yelled.Never had he seen Geeta look as she did then. She gave the impression of an aloof ice sculpture and her eyes looked at him with total disdain. In a voice cold as the wind from theArctic she said, “I have left my contacts on the table. You may require them for legal purposes. Goodbye, Ajay!” Her voice and demeanor made the parting seem final and irrevocable. * * * * * *He had still not got over Geeta’s betrayal. Three months had gone by and she had been in London for the last two of them. He has thought that she would come over to him for reconciliation but she had not bothered to even inform him of her departure. Sometimes it seemed to him that she had merely been putting on an act of affection when they were still a couple. At other times, he blamed her career ambitions for getting in the way of their marital life.What he could never understand was why she was so angry about the life that they had lead. He had never forced anything on her and she could always have done what she wanted. He had never refused to do anything that she had asked him to do though, of course, he did grumble about it as who did not? It seemed to him like she had unreasonably accused him and justified her act of putting her career above their relationship by blaming him without reason. He missed her badly, nevertheless, and was sometimes sorely tempted to call her up but his pride would not let him do so.* * * * * *It was a busy day at office and his boss called him in just when he was planning to call it a day.“Listen, Ajay! You will have to stay back tonight. Remember that project loan we are processing? Apparently the client is in a hurry and our management wants it processed expeditiously. You have to make a presentation for me by tomorrow so that I can have it cleared for taking up with the credit committee.”He was irritated. It was close to 8 PM and his boss was practically ordering him to stay without sleep that night without even the courtesy of making it a request. He swallowed his resentment, collected the details and went back to his cabin.It was 4 AM by the time he was done with the job. He saw little reason to go back home since he would have to be back by 9 AM to hand over the fruits of his work to his boss.While explaining the details of the presentation to his boss, he could not help yawning repeatedly.“Sleepy so early in the morning, Ajay?” said his boss, censoriously.“Had to stay at office all night to finish this presentation”“That is your job, Ajay!” said his boss dismissively and returned to the work at hand.Ajay was furious. First he had been asked to do something out of the way, sacrificing his sleep, without even the courtesy of an apology. Now that he had done it his boss was taking it totally for granted. No wonder this man was the least-liked boss in the entire bank.For no reason his mind went back to Geeta, then. Suddenly, the reason why Geeta left him hit him like a douche of icy cold water.* * * * * *How could he have been so self-centered? So insensitive? So domineering? He had never thought of himself as a bad person but, suddenly, it seemed to him that he had been positively evil in his treatment of Geeta. He had always thought that he loved Geeta but, now, it seemed to him that he had not even known the meaning of love.Geeta had loved him or, at least, tried to ensure that they lead a life of love. She had tried to make him happy at the cost of sacrificing her own likes. He, on the other hand, had not never ever bothered to even learn what she liked nor had he given any importance to the likes and dislikes that she had voluntarily expressed. Worse still, he had taken her sacrifices for granted without even a cursory acknowledgement. In effect, what he disliked in his boss was exactly what he had done to Geeta. Now, it seemed to him a wonder that she had stayed with him for as long as five years.It was neither what he sought her to do nor what he did not do that was the problem for Geeta. He realized that now. It was his attitude. When first he had presented her the red salwar and she had expressed a preference for blue he could have said, “I love seeing you in red, Geeta! Will you please wear it for my sake” and she would have happily done so. Instead he had laid down the rule. She had been hurt but still generous enough to fall in with his wishes for all their time together and it had not even struck him as necessary to tell her how much he appreciated that.He cringed when he thought of their initial battles about food. Why had it never struck him that if he felt difficulty eating hot food, Geeta would have equal difficulty in eating bland food? After all, your tastes are determined by what you have been brought up on and changing them would be as difficult for her as for him. Instead, he had imposed his tastes on her, derided her when she was changing over her style of cooking and had grudgingly acknowledged the change-over. Never once had he even thought about how much affection she must have had for him to put up with all that and, still, change her tastes to suit.It seemed to him that Geeta had asked little of him but an acknowledgement of the fact that she was doing things to please him because she wanted him to be happy and not because she felt bound to do so. By refusing to even give her that acknowledgement he had made her feel like a servant instead of his wife. Now he could realize that Geeta must have felt that there was no use in discussing her career with him since he had never once bothered to consider her point of view.She had been an essentially non-aggressive person and, subconsciously, he had equated that with weakness. Had she been truly weak she would have continued to compromise with him and lead a loveless life till the end of their days together. When she showed how strong she was by deciding to leave him, he had lashed out in surprised anger and, probably, lost her for ever.* * * * * *Geeta had been like a flower ready to give freely of her fragrance and he had chosen to try to crush the flower to get the fragrance. He smiled wryly. The time for poetic fancies was when Geeta had still not lost hope of a loving relationship with him. They seemed out of place now that she had frozen her emotions against him. So frozen had she become that for one week now all his attempts at communicating with her had fallen on deaf ears.A wave of guilt rushed through him. If he had caused Geeta to become less willing to love, less willing to be generous with the people around her and frozen in her emotions; if he had indeed crushed all the fragrance out of her then that was a sin far worse than the five years of, what he now acknowledged as, misery that he had caused her to live through. It seemed more important to him, now, to apologize for his unpardonable behavior than to even try to get her back in his life.He bent towards the blank pages – as blank as his desolate life – and started to write.

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