Whenever I hear or read about
forgiving or being forgiven, I recollect a story that never fails to probe the
limits of the act. You may find its events controversial or you may consider those justifiable, holding equal potential to evoke revulsion and compassion. Personally, I've found it hard to judge or pass
any opinion about it because I have never lived inside the souls of its characters,
never known the size of the shoes they had to walk in and because my own life
is riddled with a long list of terrible choices. But I prefer not to judge
mainly because I believe that some choices in life so inevitably lead to
struggles and sufferings that their making cannot be weighed in the everyday one-dimensional
scale of right or wrong.
A friend of mine fell in love
with a married woman. He was himself married for three years. They had come to
know of each other in the virtual recesses of expressions, drifting from their own loveless unions, waiting for
something they were not even sure of at the time. And right from the moment of
their first exchange of emails something clicked too perfectly between them.
There was no introspection, there wasn’t the usual delay and weighing of the
sides – none of those things; they hurtled themselves at each other with the
accumulated velocity of too old and too strong a desire. Having wandered for
years in search of what they’d finally found, my friend and this woman had an
understandably intense affair, filling the long looming void in each other’s
existence. They fit into their mutual needs like pieces of puzzle. It was as if
their union bore cosmic proportions, and they came into it showering endless
affection and passion. She flew across two continents to meet him. And they spent
three memorable days fulfilling every void, every corner of darkness in their
hearts with the light of love.
I was there when he saw her off. Who’d have known then that the kiss she blew
across from the far end of the boarding gate while disappearing into the conveyance
bus would be the last one in their story.
All this time I’ve been hearing
from my friend me why there never will be another woman like her, why he’d give
up everything to relive those three days. She was beautiful, smart, sensitive,
kind and she loved my friend with all her heart. Often when I ask myself as to
what could have propelled them so irreversibly at each other I realize that
apart from deep, binding and overwhelming love there could be no other reason.
It was the perfect kind of
love. Except that the only imperfection in their story made all the difference.
Distance. What initially helped them fight the separation of a thousand miles
was their mutual longing for love and a shared proclivity to express it. They proclaimed what they
felt through endless trade of words. But in the end their story set itself for a
sad realization that love can fight off many things yet its own demons sometimes
conquer it. Living away gradually began to choke them. The apparent jealousy,
the blank spaces in time when neither could be certain of the other’s state,
the demands of their respective families began to surround the innocence of
their affections. She was the first one who sensed it and immediately voiced
the hope of a home.
She knew that their relationship
needed to be given a formal foundation. She was confident that it was too real
to be denied the dignity of recognition it deserved. But my friend couldn’t
summon the will to suspend the people concerned, the families involved, in
misery. He felt it would be betrayal. I remember once asking him ‘Why don’t you
choose? It’s terrible to see you like this. Dying for a woman who is ready to
live with you but cannot since you’re not able to leave your wife for whom you
nurture no feeling at all’ All he said was ‘I owe it to her family. They
never came asking for the marriage. It was mine which had gone seeking her hand. I
can’t do this.’
‘But this suffering? This is
too much. How long will you be able to last like this?’
‘I can’t trample upon the
happiness of others for finding mine’.
‘What about her happiness? The
woman you pledge your devotion to?’
‘Not being able to be with her
is death for me. But it is a death I cannot avoid. For the choices I’ve made in
my life mandate my bondage’
When you feel so strongly for a person but cannot love her the way your heart longs to, it wrenches the life out of your soul. What followed was a haunting ordeal. She tried to take her life,
stayed at the hospital for three days. The effects of that act had the most
tragic consequence for her health. She had to give up something precious to
every woman. These were powerful wounds. Powerful enough to devastate to shreds
the most sacred ties of affection. They separated. She took a call. She had to.
He forced her to by his denial to hold her hand before the world.
A couple of years have flown
by. I do not know what happened with the wonderful lady but I see my friend trying to
perfect the pretense of living a normal life, in his home with his family, and
relatives, doing his job. I see him celebrating festivals and laughing loudly and
greeting neighbors. The world sees it too. But as his close companion I alone
am privy to the nights he wanders away from sanity carrying the weight of emptiness,
trying to beat his solitude with whatever he can grab, the unhelpful company of
friends he can't relate to or some pointless indulgence here and there, searching
for a semblance of meaning and purpose to his existence, scanning the
shallowness of his being in the shadows of the dark. I quietly watch the
reckless things he does as though there is this secret endeavor he is making to
reach a point of no return. I observe the loss of aspiration that he suffers
bit by bit, adding up, readying him for a final withdrawal. The very mention of
the woman’s name makes him tremble like a child under the influence of something
stunning.
He knows he cannot ever make
good for what the woman lost. He can
never give her back those days, those moments she gave away from her life. That
is why I hope she moves on. Maybe, as I write this memoir, she has already approached
that tipping point. I know my friend would want the same thing. Even though it
would break his heart, I know he’d wish her to settle down. Find a man and make
a home with him. He knows how dearly she dreams of those simple joys.
As for my friend, I admit, it devastates
me to see him long hopelessly for her, who is one simple choice away, the
choice of following his heart. A choice, I know too well he won’t make. I know
the chains that tie him cannot be broken. For there is no one who can break
those but him. And he won’t ever lift the axe.
Sometimes it occurs to me that
he shouldn’t have married without love. If he did then he shouldn’t have had
the affair. And if he had it then he should have seen it through. For all the
immeasurable pain he inflicted on her by being unable to marry her, I pray that
she is happy again, in real. She is a kind woman. She is loyal. She is truthful
and brave. I know that she craves real love. Therefore I pray that she finds
the love that she deserves, that she is made for.
And one day, when all this is
over, when she is finally gone to a home, to another comforting pair of arms,
to another path to her dreams; when all this is a memory, will then my friend
be able to forgive himself? For not standing up when it would have made a
difference? For not respecting the longings of his soul and failing
it? From whom else should my friend seek forgiveness? From the woman he
loved, the one whom he wronged by not taking their momentous love story to its
logical end, or from his wife whom he is going to keep inside a smokescreen for
the rest of their lives pretending to be in her need? And what price must he
pay for absolution, if at all there would be any, given all the things he took away from the woman and the terribleness of
the sufferings he let her undergo and the excruciating anguish he immersed his
own poor soul in by giving it a temporary taste of what should only have been
forever.
As for me. Well, I grudge time.
It should have never let the two of them meet in the first place. It knew all
too well how their souls are and what inescapable levels of
attraction they would wield on each other once their paths crossed. Time
knew that their future was not under one roof. Therefore, for the sake of love
and the falling it took in the story, must not time remain unforgivable?
As I said at the start I won't
judge anyone. Who am I to judge? All I can think of today, after living with
their story for so long (June marked two years of the kiss she blew at the terminal) is that man cannot be created for such suffering, such disenchantment.
Not unless some sort of a divine reprisal is the reason behind all of it. Maybe
therefore, before anyone else, my friend and the woman of his dreams need
forgiveness, for whatever wrong in whichever timeline of whichever birth they may have committed, the one that happens to foster the origins of their
agony. As a helpless bystander I can only offer my prayers seeking that
forgiveness for them and hope that the price of their absolution is no more dearer than it already has been.
