If you haven’t read the story of how Rekha and I got married please read that first. It is our story of how my wife and I fell in love, almost separated, and then got back together to get married.
What you are going to read below is wife’s version of the same love story. How she may have seen it – still written by her husband.
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Rajan has already told you how he “brought me back.”
I am using quotation marks because like most men, he thinks the story is about what he did.
Let me tell you what really happened and I am going to call this story “How I waited for a man to grow a brain.”
Rajan told you that we first met in 2001 while working at Tidel Park in Chennai. That’s so typical of men, he missed the dates by a year.
We first met in October 2000, when we working in Prince Towers, Nungambakkam and our office was moving to the Tidel Park. Our desktops were the last to be packed, and we both were standing watching our belongings getting into a huge carton.
That’s when he had said, “Hi…my name is Rajan.”
His next meaningful sentence was six months later.
During the six months we had worked together, I had observed him enough to know three things:
– One, he was funny.
– Two, he was harmless.
– Three, he had far more confidence than his salary justified.
If you have known men enough, you know that this combination is dangerous. A funny man with a low salary and high confidence can convince himself that he is God’s gift to women.
So naturally he asked me out one day. Not directly, of course because men of that generation did not ask girls out directly.
Those were the times, when if one wanted to marry a girl all you had to do was hold her hand in public…. and a crowd would gather around the boy and the girl and the ‘punishment’ for the boy would be to marry the girl.
Anyway, the men of those times would ask things like, “Have you eaten?” or “Do you want to have lunch?” and Rajan did just that.
I agreed. And where do you think this man took me? Velu Military Hotel, in Nungambakkam, Chennai.
I was the only woman sitting among men eating mutton as if the next day they were all going to be hanged for participating in the Civil Disobedience Movement.
While the food was good, that was my first sign that he wasn’t a normal man. A normal man trying to impress a girl might take her to a coffee shop. A slightly ambitious man might take her to a nice restaurant. But he took me to a military hotel and watched me carefully to see whether I would survive.
I think that was his idea of romance. Looking back, maybe it was a test…if I could survive a Military Hotel, I could survive him.
After lunch, he dropped me back at my hostel on his Yamaha. His Yamaha, whose number was 3747 deserves a separate article. For Rajan, that bike was not a vehicle….it was a personality.
He sat on it like a man who owned half of Chennai. In reality, he owned one bike, and most of the time we were going out I was paying his fuel bills.
As he was leaving after dropping me, I asked him, “Which way do you go to office?”
Now, I asked this casually….as any girl who is looking for a transport to her office would.
I was not proposing marriage. But men are different…give them half a sentence, and they will build a palace.
He immediately said, “Via your hostel. Every day.” I don’t remember whether I was impressed or worried.
Finally I gave him my number, which was my mistake. To be fair, he also gave me his number….which was his mistake.
From the next day, we started meeting regularly and spent a lot of time together. He would keep making jokes, and I would keep laughing.
Laughing at his jokes was my second mistake. My advice…never laugh too much at a man’s jokes in the early stages….for he will think he is funny for life.
Today, after more than two decades, he still thinks every joke of his deserves an audience, a pause, and applause.
But those days were nice because he was sweet in his own irresponsible way. He would act as if he was in control of everything, but I could see that he wasn’t.
There is a certain charm in watching a man who thinks he is a player slowly fall into his own trap.
Apparently, he had a six-month plan. He wanted to take me around for six months and then dump me. Thankfully I came to know about this plan much later….if I had known it earlier I would have saved myself six months and dumped him in six minutes.
Every day was more fun than the next. And since I didn’t know of his plan, I thought this was going somewhere.
We women have a super sense around the guys. If a guy likes us, we know.
We don’t need six months, four beers, or a low-budget detective scene outside Hotel Sangeeta to understand our feelings.
So one day, after almost a year, I asked him, “Rajan, shouldn’t we get married?”
I did not ask this because I was desperate but because I needed clarity. I needed to know if I was wasting my time with him or not.
A woman may love a man, but she also needs to know whether he is man enough or he is treating the relationship like the compulsory internship all engineering students must take in their third year.
He said, “Marriage? No way!” His response surprised me.
I don’t remember every word that followed, but I remember the feeling. It was as if someone had taken a bowl of hot sambar and quietly poured it into my heart. Don’t ask me why it was sambar and not dal tadka…these are matters of the heart, and don’t need so much introspection.
It was a simple question. I had not said, “Marry me tomorrow or I will jump in front of your Yamaha,” which anyway had very thin tyres, and would have struggled to hurt me.
I had simply asked whether we should get married but Rajan behaved as if I had asked him to donate one of his kidneys, his mother’s heart and his father’s liver.
That day, I understood that Rajan liked being loved, but he didn’t know how to love back.
So I stepped back. There was no point in creating drama. Neither did I throw anything at him. Please note that since our marriage, I have improved tremendously in this department. Now I am the drama queen.
Back then, I simply reduced access. We still spoke, and worked together but I stopped giving him the feeling that I was waiting at the same place where he had left me.
This is something men don’t understand. When a woman becomes quiet, it is not peace….she is a ship at sea loading her torpedoes.
Around that time, my parents started looking for proposals. If my relatives had it their way, they would have kept me in a fridge so that I don’t age and go bad like a carton of milk.
I would tell Rajan about all the proposals that came my way because we were still friends. And also because I knew he was listening. He would pretend to be casual.
“What does he do?”
“Where is he from?”
“Oh, Bangalore?”
“Real Estate?”
“Hmm.”
That “hmm” had more jealousy in it than 2002 movie ‘Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam’, where Shah Rukh Khan’s character spends the whole film resenting Salman Khan’s platonic bond with his wife Madhuri Dixit.
But Rajan was able to hold himself till one particular proposal came through: a Creative Director of Lowe Lintas ad agency, from Mumbai.
I don’t remember the guy’s name now, but I was supposed to meet him, his mother and his sister at Hotel Sangeeta, Mylapore.
This was the same hotel where Rajan and I used to have our dinner every day for the last one year.
I promise, I didn’t choose the hotel for the meeting, for that would have been a cruel revenge. I wasn’t that cruel back then. It was the boy’s choice because it was closest to my hostel.
I even asked Rajan, “He has a slightly receding hairline…should that matter?”
What I wanted to see was not whether the hairline mattered. I wanted to see whether I mattered.
He said something like, “You have a fun meeting, Rekha!”
Men think women don’t hear the crack in their voice. They don’t know that we hear everything. We hear what you say and we also hear what you don’t say. We even hear the silence between two stupid sentences.
That evening, I went to Hotel Sangeeta to meet the prospective groom and his family.
The man was decent and his mother and sister weren’t bad either. Aren’t they all the same before marriage?
But I have a problem with decent men. There is nothing obviously wrong with them – they come with education, salary, family approval, and no visible madness.
Compared to that, Rajan came with jokes, emotional confusion, a Yamaha, and a habit of behaving like he was in a movie, with a director sitting nearby shouting ‘Action!’
After the meeting, the Lowe Lintas man offered to drop me. He got me an auto and got in as well. It was harmless…and after dropping me he left.
What I did not know then was that somewhere behind us, a half-drunk man on a Yamaha was following the auto like double agent from CID Chennai branch.
Later, I came to know that Rajan had called me seventeen times as well. My mobile was on silent because my parents had been calling me at regular intervals to check if I had met the family, and how it was going.
This is why I have always believed that the way to a man’s heart is through jealousy. When a woman asks for commitment, they become silent. When another man enters the picture, suddenly they discover communication skills.
The next day, Rajan came to me and said he had made a mistake and apologised. Now he wanted to marry me. I did not immediately accept, after all I also had my pride.
After all, I am not a toothbrush that he can reject first, compare with 69 options, and then select after a discount.
But without telling Rajan, I quietly refused the Lowe Lintas proposal.
I didn’t tell him that he was off the hook because a man who takes one year to realise your value must be made to undergo an Advanced Diploma in Regret Management.
So I made him wait for six months. For him it seems like punishment but I see it as necessary education.
During this time we re-started the pick-up and drops, and spending time together…and since I knew I was eventually going to marry him, I stopped asking him for money every time I would fill his petrol tank.
But I still have the diary where I have written how much I spent for him – petrol, masala dosa at Sangeetha, etc. He doesn’t realize he’s been paying for these since then.
Anyway, I don’t know if every day he wondered, “Will she say yes today?” but I am sure once in a while he must have thought about it.
With time he stopped behaving like a man who had options and started behaving like a man who had almost lost the only option that mattered.
Somewhere between educating him, and marrying him we lived in together for a year.
After one more year of pleading, convincing, apologising, and showing slightly better behaviour, I agreed. And we got married on 8 September 2004.
Since then, life has happened. We have had kids, got new jobs, lost them, got loans and returned them, gained weight, lost them and gained again…why we have even started sleeping in different bedrooms.
People now read his posts and tell me, “Rekha, you are so lucky. He writes about you with so much love.”
I smile. Because they don’t know the full story. They don’t know that before he wrote about me with love, he first had to be taught how not to lose me.
Rajan says he brought me back into his life and I don’t mind that. In fact, I want him to believe that because men need their small victories. But honestly, it was me who was the player all along. I orchestrated this marriage.
Of course, I did not marry him because he was perfect. I married him because even in his most foolish moments, he was still my favourite problem.