Sunday, December 18, 2011

Agony Of A Wife From Small Town


born in the adobe of beautiful hills, she was a wild weed.
educated in an ordinary pathshala in a small town of himachal, she only aspired to become a perfect house-maker of someone else’s household.
for her, geography was bhugool and science was always vigyaan. math was ganit and only english was english. she almost hated that language & always wondered why it was taught in the schools at all.
while she was struggling very hard to score at least passing marks in the language, she did not know that one day this language will become the centre of her existence.
she did not have the opportunity to go to the college. only an ugly looking boring teacher would come home everyday to teach this group of seven cousins.
in their free time, they would go to the nearby stream to collect some pebbles, get drench in rains & burglar apple orchids.
soon the family was looking for a suitable match for her. a himachali boy came with his family one day. he was working in a big firm in gurgaon(cyber city)
the guy was born and brought up in a metro city & had NEVER BEEN even once to his home town in himachal. since the parents insisted on having a daughter-in-law who could follow the same tradition, they decided to find a simple small town himachali girl. the guy did not mind the idea as he was to get a beautiful looking girl to keep in the bargain.
after settlement of dowry & other rituals related to money, finally the marriage culminated into a life-long relationship between the two.
next week she was in A THREE bedroom flat in one of the high rises in gurgaon. she had never seen such huge buildings before and now she was living on the 25th floor. huge mountains & hills never scared her but these buildings did. she could not sleep for nights all together with a fear that the building might fall.
the husband would go to office at night & sleep during the day. she would step down 25 stories by stairs as she did not know how to use the elevators. even after several attempts by the poor husband, she simply avoided using those. the fear of falling once again.
her cloths were also very different from what others women wore. it was almost another country for her. husband took her to malls during the weekends to buy her some trendy clothes but it took them half an hour to make the wife climb up the escalators.
the husband was now probably getting embarrassed with her presence. her beauty did not charm him anymore.
to please him, she even asked him to bring his colleagues home for lunch. but the whole afternoon, she could not understand a single conversation with them as she could not understand a single sentence of theirs. she wished she had learnt english better when in school. this embarrassed the husband further.
with time, he started escaping all occasions which demanded their presence together. He would attend all parties himself. would shop by himself during the weekend.
she changed her wardrobe entirely. though she did not like even a single cloth out of the collections, yet she wore them. got a new jazzy hair cut too. with the help of cd’s of english learning program, she practiced english learning religiously. her only purpose of existence had reduced to be able to learn the language & impress people around, stay presentable & no more embarrassing the husband.
she learnt to greet people & respond to their basic queries but yet she could not initiate or participate in any sort of discussion. when too much english coming from the other side confused HER, she would defend herself with an immediate forceful “yes yes” & “:” no no” . well the husband was till embarrassed.
with time she gave birth to twin boys. when they started going to pre-school, she could not understand even a single thing spoken by their teachers. she would pick up certain words shared by the teachers and try to find meaning in Google and make an assumption about the development of her kids.
when they grew older and went to a formal school. she became an object of embarrassment to her sons as well. they would insist on calling only the father to come for the school events as they did not find their mom to be upgraded version as other mothers were.
but she did not stop trying. leaving behind all her up-bringing, all her education , her childhood her town- she is still trying to learn the language.

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