The Honeymoon is over
It started out easy, breezy like a lovely spring day. Full of promise and hope, a fresh scent of a beginning for something grand in the air. We had never met, but I was sure, I knew enough. I was madly in love. Come what may.
It felt almost like an arranged marriage, like in this one reality TV show I had watched growing up. An English relationship expert was advocating for the idea of outside match-making and arranged marriages, instructing participants against only following their foolish, passionate hearts. I had felt a strong resonance with the idea of looking past appearances and focusing more on the qualities that would make a great match on paper too and then committing. And now there I was; qualities of an ideal partner listed on paper, four pages long, internet algorithms having worked their magic and I had finally found that special someone and everything seemed to make sense.
Though I guess no one in the lives of either one of us would have fixed this union, as we were seemingly worlds apart. But to me it was my very own Disney fairytale, with birds chirping around my head like in all those princess animations I had grown up watching over and over again. It was agreed upon by the universe and destiny and whichever stars aligning or scientific ‘miracles’ occurring. I belonged to India.
I remember the first time my feet touched the ground in India in May 2016. Everyone had told me, even my Indian boyfriend, it was such an overwhelming land of extremes, something not easily dealt with. But I was confident, cocky even, in my unwaivering belief that there was nothing I couldn’t handle for love. Delhi, a city over twice as populated as my whole country, where such beauty and history lies beneath the trash and pollution, in the middle of a great heat wave. But I didn’t feel overwhelmed. I felt as if I was standing on solid ground for the first time in my life, somewhere I hadn’t ever been before, but knew in my heart was home.
But at first I didn’t pay attention to any of it. At first I was welcomed with open arms. We moved to Vizag where everything seemed even lovelier, if possible. I could close my eyes, hear the crashing waves and breathe in the fresh sea breeze. However, gradually I started to feel the glares on my white skin and even the quickest glance or a smile seemed to be an open invitation for unwarranted attention. I noticed that saying no was only the start of a negotiation, a haggle. In some places the smells and strong incense gave me terrible nausea, while the heat and humidity suddenly made me weak and tired, if I left the one room with the AC. More often than not I did not share the same language, so I wasn’t even able to ask our maid to organise the kitchen utensils in a certain way. Now the way I was used to cleaning and maintaining hygiene was bordering brainlessness. Spoons I left on the kitchen counter didn’t go unnoticed, by the cockroaches either. “Ma’am never take plastic”, the store lady would laugh at my boyfriend while weighing the vegetables. I felt eyes rolling next to me whatever I did. My way of doing things was stupid and inefficient. Paying the rent took me three hours and I spent half the day in the kitchen perfecting my dal. I would blame the pressure cooker and the gas stove and the knives and how challenging it felt when I was forced to learn again how to do anything and change myself completely. India would laugh in my face for my inability to change my ways and learn how to use them.
We blamed each other for everything, but was either one of us ready to say sorry or forgive and move on? Before this, before Vizag, I had been merely a guest and guest is God. But when that comes to an end, what is left? Had it been just an illusion, an exciting adventure and now it was my time to go back?
I watched an Indo-American Netflix documentary about finding a partner and arranged marriages once. The old father, who had had an arranged marriage, told his young son in search of love how you can be together with someone for 40 years and you still will not know them completely. Every day you will learn something new and every day things will change. So you will have to be willing to learn and forgive. The honeymoon is over, but are we still in this together?
