Relationships

Yesterday we had an old friend over for lunch, visiting from Mumbai, and sadly he confirmed something that we had had an inkling of for sometime but not known - he had split up with his wife of 9 years and was on his own.

It felt very disorienting to me to hear this and I'm still trying to make sense of it. We knew both of them from the time they began dating - we knew her through him, and A, I and he worked in the same organisation. We've karaoked together and gotten pissed together. Yesterday morning when I was reorganising the photo-album cupboard, I found a bunch of pictures of the four of us from a trip to Corbett and another one to Kasauli. The whole time he was at our place, I had a film reel running through the back of my mind of all the time we had spent together.

The four of us had gone off on a long weekend to Kasauli with absolutely no planning, since we were all four in advertising, and it is absolutely fatal in that profession to actually plan a short break - it always falls through. The place was packed and we eventually found a small little hotel, where they allowed us three buckets of water for everything from flushing to bathing! We went for lovely long walks through the city and out to where we could only see the hills and the greenery, and all the way there and back we sang lovely old Hindi film melodies...

We went to Corbett together and stayed at Dhikala, the government motel, many years ago...I still remember all four of us sharing nauseated feelings when the place decided to show a video of a python ingesting a deer right after we finished dinner...and how we laughed our heads off at the sign posted by the lake - Swimming is strictly forbidden ( due to crocodiles). Survivors will be prosecuted! We'd spotted hyenas lurking in the darkness after dinner, when all the lights were turned off with a stunning togetherness, and both she and I had had nightmares about tigers forcing their way into our rooms...

I remembered a New Year's party at their place shortly after they had gotten married, where the cook they had hired kicked the bucket - literally. He got drunk, kicked a huge bucket of cold water over everybody and fell down in a stupor, leaving the cold, shivering, damp partiers to grill their own kebabs...

A had stayed over with them any number of times when he was in Bombay on work...They had come over a couple of years ago, when I was expecting Puddi and had a lovely long lunch with us in our terrace garden and we'd all had a wonderful time...and by the end of that year they had decided to call it a day and go their separate ways...

It's thankfully, for us, almost the first instance of a couple splitting up where we were friends with both parties, though we've seen quite a few almost get there and then make it back together. It feels very close to home and I wonder how, after so many years of togetherness, after setting up homes together and dreaming joint dreams of the future, it all comes apart...

A was saying later that marriages really need work in this day and age and I wondered to myself that I had never found either of us putting in any 'work' on our marriage...But then he reminded me that both of us were very clear on some issues, like the fact that we and the family came first, ahead of work, friends or anything else...that we made it a point to ensure that we spent time together, even doing something as banal as watching a movie together, but we spent it actively with each other, sharing the experience...that we used each other as the key sounding board for any decision we had to make...that we had long ago decided that we would never live apart for any length of time because of a work opportunity...

I guess it all comes down to a shared sense of values and priorities - the couple has to have the same vision of a joint future...