An Unkind Sunday

An Unkind Sunday

It is Sunday morning and my first feeling as I wake up is of joy. No rush for going to the office, no rounds of discussions with clients, no preparation of briefs and, above all, a round of golf in the afternoon. But the euphoria vanishes the moment I recall that Shaila will be coming at around eleven to make, as she is fond of claiming, my favourite style of coffee for me. It is not that I don’t like her company; she is intelligent, a good conversationalist and is highly regarded in the college where she holds the post of a lecturer in the History department. Above all, she understands and appreciates my work as a corporate lawyer. But notwithstanding all this, I shudder at the thought of allowing anyone to come close to me. You see, I am forty-five years old, and have been living alone for the last seven years, that is ever since Smita left me after eight years of married life. In these seven years, I have become used to a certain way of life, and I have no desire to change it to suit someone else’s desires.

Did I say eight years of happy married life? No, they were not happy years except maybe the first two or three years. Smita had been a painter before her marriage to me and after a few years when it appeared to us that we were not going to be blessed with parenthood, she started getting restless. I encouraged her to take up painting once again, and once she did so there was a change in her. Her cheerful nature returned to her as she got more and more immersed in her passion. She soon engaged a known artist to further sharpen her skill. I liked the guy; I used to like his work as also the way Smita's painting improved under his tutelage. She even got a chance of holding an exhibition of her paintings in the city's art gallery. Knowing that she was happy also made me free to concentrate on my work, and soon I became one of the partners in our law firm.

This happy state did not last long, however. There were signs of Smita’s increasing closeness to her art teacher, though at first I did not notice them nor did I discern her gradual coolness towards me; in fact, I sometimes felt guilty that I had become too immersed in my work and was probably not giving enough time to Smita. It, therefore, came as a bolt from the blue when one day she announced that she was moving in to live with her art teacher. I could hardly believe what she was saying; I thought it was a joke, or probably her way of reminding me that I had been neglecting her. But one cannot escape reality for long; I found that she was adamant, and once I realized that there was no possibility of her changing her mind, we decided to part amicably. Being in the legal profession, I could work out a quick and smooth divorce, and that was the curtains for our eight years of married life.

It will be wrong to say that I was not badly singed. I was shattered, but more than the pain of separation was the bewilderment. I just could not understand what happened, and how and why it happened. She had all the luxuries she could wish for, she had the freedom to follow her passion. My friends told me that perhaps I had not been giving her enough time. But was I really to blame? She knew before marriage that I was in a very demanding job. There must have been other factors that I did not understand. Gradually I stopped analyzing what went wrong or what could have been done. The lesson I learnt was that on the whole, it was better to live alone; the task of consciously or unconsciously modifying one’s way of living to suit someone else’s expectations was not worth the effort.

Thus it is that though it is Sunday and the day is glorious and there is no pressure of office or work, I am still far from being happy. The fact that Shaila is coming at eleven and is going to make coffee for me which we will sip sitting on the balcony should normally have made me quite happy, but my apprehension is that she is nursing a secret desire to fill what she thinks is an empty space in my life. It is not that she has ever said so explicitly; she is too subtle for that. What gives me an inkling of her long-term design is that last Sunday she brought a neatly wrapped packet, which turned out to be a print, nicely framed, of a Monet painting, which she with her own hands fixed on a wall in my living room, saying that this empty space was not looking nice and needed to be filled up. Now I am no psychologist but I do believe that one's outward actions and words reveal one's secret, subconscious desires. I am not prepared at this stage of my life to change how I live and if there is some empty space, let it be there. I, however, do not know how to gently tell her that she is welcome only this far and no further. You cannot say this sort of thing bluntly.

Shaila comes a little after eleven. She is wearing a blue sari; she knows it is my favourite colour; in fact, in one of my unguarded moments, I had told her that she looked very pretty in blue. The fact that she is in blue today, coupled with her fixing the Monet painting on the empty wall in my living room only confirms my suspicion about her secret plan. But suddenly an idea strikes me, and while she is in the kitchen, happily making the coffee, I quietly take out the picture from the wall and keep it wrapped up on the dining table. As she comes back with the coffee tray she notices that the wall is once again empty. She looks questioningly at me but it is only a brief glance. A shadow passes on her countenance. She has obviously understood what I could not say in words. I do feel sad, but also feel relieved because I know that she will not be coming on the next Sunday, or on any Sunday after that.