A Woman, Loving
Fifteen days from the day I write this essay, time will find November. In this month, six years back, I lost my Uppuppa to a brain aneurysm. Although at the time I was oblivious to this disease, I knew it would bring gloomy clouds over my household. The days after were filled with weeping eyes and praying hands. In a closed room, I found my Ummumma wearing white and reciting the Quran. She hasn’t stopped crying after planting her final kiss on his forehead. I embraced my grandmother to calm her and felt her tears falling onto my shoulders. There was so much love and agony in them.
Deafness settled in her ears when she was in her 40s. I remember Uppa saying how grandfather screams her name from the verandah and a few syllables will reach the kitchen to which she responds with a cup of tea. It is said that they were married when she was just 14 years old. Though it's hard to ingest the fact they had to wed at such a young age, Ummumma fondly recalls how she got to grow up with her husband.
I think my first lessons about loving a man may have come from my observance of my grandmother's love for her husband. It was the only in-presence love I could witness. While my Umma's had to be limited to a few phone calls and letters since Uppa was in Saudi most of the year, it is my grandmother's that I quizzed myself with. Most of her love was engulfed in the food she prepared because the kitchen was the only place in the house where she could open her heart out. Ummumma had never failed to bring a plate without the incandescent affection she carries within her. Later, I involuntarily inherited this as my love language.
In Simple Passion, Annie Ernaux writes, “From September last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man.” In a coalescence of every woman loving a man that I had encountered in my life, I found that each of them has made their man become their world. Although in my teenage years I was disgusted by this very thought, at 21, I’ve become one of them. It’s quite easy to dismiss this way of loving someone by saying you should put yourself first. This indeed holds some risks–it can be disheartening to take in when this person leaves you with a bottomless boat. The resulting grief can get tiresome too. But in the moment of love, only love wins.
There can be several reasons why when a woman loves, she puts the man on the pedestal in her entire universe. One interesting takeaway arises from the cultural setting the society has laid before her. Women like my grandmother and my mother, are taught from a very young age that nothing belongs to them. Though this learning is not through dictation and speech alone, a lot of actions and norms make this statement true. From birth, women were prepared to be someone else’s wife. They were constantly told nothing belonged to them. Maybe this deprivation of not having anything to call theirs may have caused them to cease the love they have until they find someone they can possess as a whole. And from the moment they find the one, everything around them becomes that single person. Even a mundane chore they do may have an indifferent relation to the person they love. Every book you read, every movie you watch, every song you listen to will be somehow about this person.
Annie has put down this perfectly in her essay.
“In the course of conversation, the only subjects that escaped my indifference were those related to this man, his work, the country he came from, and the places he’d been to. The person speaking to me had no idea that my sudden interest in their conversation had nothing to do with their description or even the subject itself, but with the fact that one day, ten years before I met him, A had been sent to Havana on an assignment and may have set foot in that very night club, the “Fiorendito,” which they were describing in minute detail, encouraged by my attentive listening.”
In the modern era, to a certain extent, this viewpoint remains accurate. Although feminism and empowerment are changing the narratives of how women should be raised, love languages have been continuously passed from generation to generation. We instinctively pick them up at some point in our lives, learning and unlearning to be better partners. We cook, feed, buy flowers, and write letters and tiny snippets that have verses of our favourite poet underlined with little hearts scribbled next to it. In the course of time, we become them, and they us, together giving birth to a garden that only blooms for us.
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