Cross Your Heart, Take My Name by Novoneel Chakraborty

Author:Novoneel Chakraborty [Chakraborty, Novoneel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353059934
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

21

9 November 2018

This was the longest we had gone without talking or meeting. Neither was to be blamed. Diwali was a few days ago. Yahvi’s husband’s family was visiting, while Nihira and I were in Delhi. Nihira mostly stayed with me at my parents’ place in CR Park except for two days when she went to Dwarka to live with her folks.

This time, for undecipherable reasons, I observed my parents closely and noticed a few things that were new to me. My father is a probashi Bengali while my mother is Punjabi. They met during their respective PhDs in Delhi. In fact, my father was her senior. My mother always told me how much she hated my father for being overtly serious about everything. They were part of the same group of friends but were never that friendly. When I asked her what made her choose Dad, she said she knew if she had gone with her parents’ choice she would have had to leave her professional aspirations and move to Canada. When she got to know Dad better, she realized he was a man who would always listen to her. She took the first step. Dad said yes. And they have been married for thirty-seven years. I thought that was a little selfish of my mother. She married my father because she thought he was someone who would listen to her all his life. My father had a rather funny answer when I asked him the same questions.

‘I knew I had to listen to someone all my life. And I had never seen anyone as beautiful as your mother. So I chose to listen to the second most beautiful woman I’d seen after my mother, and that was your mother.’

It sounded funny but it was also a selfish choice. Choosing someone for their beauty. And then I started wondering, why did I choose Nihira? The only answer I could think of was that nobody made me feel as comfortable as she did. That too was selfish. To be with someone because they made you feel comfortable. It really doesn’t matter how much we romanticize the larger-than-life selfless element in the concept of love, the choices we make, one way or the other, are always selfish. It’s more about us than the other person. We only believe the opposite to feel better about ourselves.

I also noticed that my parents took each other for granted, so much so that they were used to it now. The more I observed them, the more convinced I was that they had only existed with each other all these years. Not lived. It scared me. I didn’t want the realization that I had not lived life to the fullest to dawn on me at their age. It made me value the importance of the present. And the choices we made in that moment. This thought made me miss Yahvi even more. She’d told me not to message her till she messaged me since she was busy taking care of her relatives and her phone may not always be with her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.