“Maybe losing our cultural moorings is a side-affect of the westernization of our education,”
“You lose something to gain some other thing don’t you?” he said. “But the poetic imagination in the epics is hard to find even in the fictional aspects of the best of novels; maybe the social restraints of our times wrap up novelistic ideas in our cultural folds. When we thought that it was time to get married for form’s sake, we broke the news. While her folk felt it was redeeming for her as we happened to be of the same caste, my people had no hesitation in blessing our union for the same reason; seems caste rules our heads and hearts alike. Our well-attended wedding gave her a sense of spiritual union that our liaison failed to afford her, and again, it was Raju who took charge of the arrangements though I failed to attend his marriage that Rathi had insisted we should.”
“If I got it right, you made it seem that she had a great influence on you.”
“I’m glad you are observant and that portends well for my memoir,” he said in some excitement. “You may know that in any relationship, it is the stronger willed that calls the shots. Won’t in some ways it explains why some men are henpecked, well, some women too are cock-pecked, a rarer phenomenon at any rate. Whatever, how marriage gives a new dimension to man woman cohabitation; I felt a new sense of belonging for the woman whom I made my own for so long by then. Maybe for want of the cultural connect of marriage our live-in was bereft of a sense of spiritual union, which deprived us of the true sense of belonging in lovemaking without our knowing it. However, as we made conjugal love in our nuptial bed, from her spasms I could sense that she had experienced a rare kind of orgasm. Why, as I divined her visage in her ecstasy, her spiritual beauty that I espied gave me a premonition of her conception, that of a son. Never before or after that, with her or another, was it a like feeling.”
“Don’t they say one is happiest in the newest love?”
“No denying that but I loved to retain Rathi’s affectionate memories even as I was obsessed at not losing Ruma’s passionate love, and that should give you a measure of my weakness for Ruma, and the hold she came to have on my life.”
“You loved both of them and it’s no dichotomy. Why, a man can love more than one woman at the same time, and its no less a psychological possibility with women either.”