Marriage:

of bodies in bed & uncertain joys

Image: Chantal Convertini

And here we would be,

the only certitude of our lives -

one of us bound for elsewhere,

the other left behind.

.

And every knife we'd used lying in seriatim,

as exhibits in a museum of gore,

and the laughs frozen in time

floating as uncertain monsoon clouds.

.

There would be clothes drying in the balcony,

and the sink full of unwashed dishes -

our decades defined in objects,

tongue in the wringer, our souls adrift in the wind.

.

We would lie, two beautiful bodies in repose,

our canards in corrals, outside closed doors,

we would be naked and mask-less,

backs to each other, not bearing to face our truths.

.

But a married life is a universe,

which has debris floating astride stardust,

and even as we gaze into a sink with dismay,

there are meteors which leave our skies ablaze;

.

it's the miracles we hold in our palms together,

your hand a warm tent over my hand,

as we gaze at the grace a good day could make,

the sparkling skin between the welts.

.

We cram every space in our hearts

to carry the trauma of every season -

every word spoken in winter,

left out to simmer till summer.

.

Even historians leave out index cards

watermarked as 'bias':

we are just ordinary lives, quick to say 'I love you',

wishing to god to mean it.

Image: Artista Laurita Mazapan

A marriage is already beset with contrariness in its very idea. They say, anthropologically, a marriage is against man’s overriding instinct to rampantly spread his seed, to ensure progeny from someone at least. Nature-wise, it goes against the principle of seeking fulfilment, because one person can rarely, if ever, fulfil the myriad parts of a person's needs. I can be gregarious but end up with a self-effacing private wife. I’m bursting with the need to reach out, talk, swap tales and have a drunken Saturday night but end up with a husband who only wants to watch sports on tv. I might be spiritual in an unending search, and be with a wife in need of unending conversations.

And that’s when we start aching with the gaps inside. Of finding life to be a ragtag enterprise with little redemption. One damning relationship is an irredeemable scar sometimes. And solutions are invariably forked.

Friendships made as an individual and not a couple or falling in love with another whilst married, are often two sides to a hard line - one side is sexless, another is not. For embedded in the institution of marriage are trust, hurt and jealousy. And none of these can be easily brushed off. As it often determines what can be embraced and what cannot.

It is easy to find reconciliations and touch points of comfort as one ages, if a couple has survived the vicissitudes and the incessant rambling of youth, because reaching a plateau of acceptability is itself an arduous task. But there is a stillness to be got, and a distillation of instincts which emerges as one grows old. For our needs, which have wild compasses in youth, finally find a North Star as age and time catch up.

After shrugging off the hunger for variety and the search for the verity, there’s a plateau a person reaches, distilled of distraction, a clear distillate of failed attempts, derived realisations and evolved priorities. We are finally reconciled. And know what’s important. Maybe it’s after having all experiences, that we are able to denounce some, maybe it’s after burning our relationships to near charred state that we realise what is most important.

But irrespective of the genesis being hypocrisy or awakement, there is a peace which emerges. Of knowing that what ensues is distraction-less, of knowing that like so much else, life is also an emblem of perception, perjury, preparation and peace. We complicate things needlessly when we have the strength to realise and redeem, we search for the new when our curiosity burns like the Northern Lights, we are ready to commit to the foolish when we have the time to live out its fallouts. But it all passes.

Marriage, which we enter sometimes duty-bound, sometimes as a mistaken culmination to love, is itself a complexity. But if we emerge from its initial skirmishes and subsequent battlefields, without fallen bodies and fatal injuries, we will find beauty embedded in its gashes and scars. Like so much else, two people together are a lesson in finding zen in unwashed dishes whilst standing on the corpses of past selves, smiling into the joint journey of survival. 

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Hear the poem, intertwined as it is with gorgeous music!

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