Crossing the Mirage:Passing Through Youth

“What a self-serving attitude that is?” said Chandra.

“Well, I was not shocked but I was surely benumbed for a while,” said Sathya filling their glasses. “When I recalled the bruises on her back I used to notice day in and day out, I wondered how I gave credence to her averments of platonic love. Oh, how I got carried away too far to lose my faculties and all. And it surprises me still that I don't feel betrayed by her disclosure. What matters to me is that God had answered my prayers, and finally I would be able to make a difference to her life. I told her rather boisterously that I would marry her even if she were a mother of half a dozen children. Then she said that if she were to leave him, she had to pay him twenty thousand bucks. I didn't ask why but agreed to arrange that amount.”

“What does it mean?” asked Chandra, growing suspicious. “Is it to insure her future against your failure?”

“No, I can't credit her with such meanness?” continued Sathya. “At her mother‟s bidding we'd been to a couple of temples for blessings. Seeing her pray along with me in the sari I took along for her, I felt she belonged to me though she aired her reservations about my slimness, which made me say that fed by her hand, I would be rotund soon. Whatever, it felt nice when she wished that we got married in Palani, for its religious sanctity.”

“But why didn't you reject her,” asked Chandra skeptically, “knowing fully well you're but the second string to her bow?”

“As I told you, my love for her by then had acquired a spiritual dimension.”

“Oh, Sathya, you're just divine!”

“I don't know if I deserve your praise,” continued Sathya. “Shortly after she returned to Cal, she got panicky that my parents might prevail upon me. Well, my father, who was ever opposed to my marrying her, wrote a discouraging letter to dissuade her from marrying me. Well, to calm her nerves I went to Cal and at a friend's place I slipped that safety ring in her ring finger. You would know which one. What's more, I'd arranged for a marriage certificate as my fidelity guarantee to her though her father promised to get us married at Palani in February. Oh, how I was moved by her sensitivity when she told me that she didn't feel like wearing the saris given by him. What a moment it was for me when we shopped together to purchase saris and dresses she needed, to be on her own.”