The Wedding Equation
“Keerthi! Have you ever been in love?”
“Oh, yeah..”
“What’s it like?”
“Torture. Pure suffering”
I smirked. This time though, my smirk displayed pain.
A heavy heart should’ve caused the sulking of my eyes. What I felt in my heart was, amusingly, so similar to a physical burden, I literally had to drag myself to walk.
I heaved a sigh, my eyes still fixated on the ground. Keerthi’s eyes though, were fixated on the horizon, his gaze away from me, as if he wanted to give me some privacy despite sitting right next to me.
“Torture. Pure suffering,” his words kept ringing in my ears, and I eventually uttered it.
Before Keerthi could respond, we were distracted by the train’s loud sound, of it’s horn and it’s magnificent stride on the railway track.
Heart can wait. Train doesn’t. We had to hurry else we were getting squashed into human pulp by human pulps!
Ten minutes after we had settled in and the train started moving, my mind went back to the hanging conversation. Keerthi though, didn’t seem to remember it at all.
“I feel like that now, Keerthi. I understand what you meant by those words”, I resumed.
“What words?”He asked, completely into loading and unloading luggages, organising and moderating seating claims and requests. People’s person indeed.
I decided to pause that conversation. For then.
Later in the night, after we had our dinner and prepared our berths to retire into the night, he stopped by to say good night.
“Good night. Don’t think too much about it”
A wave of guilt washed over me. I wanted to say many things but couldn’t find the right words. Finally I just said,
“Suffering indeed. I let you suffer, now I’m on the receiving end. Aren’t we on a tie now?”
“I said stop thinking about it”
“Isn’t marriage a thing between equals?”
“ Yeah..”
“And what do you mean by equals?”
“Equal status, career, values-”
“Wrong,” I cut in.
He fixed his eyes on me. A face that exhibited full attention and concern.
“Equals in terms of pain.”
By now, he might’ve thought I’m intoxicated with love failure and had started with my philosophy orations.
“Okay, that’s great. Let’s continue this tomorrow,” he tried to escape but I grabbed his hand in lightning speed. Quick enough to startle everyone around.
After making awkward smiles at everyone I turned to him and said,
“Pain. We’ve both been through soul stirring experiences that can’t really be described or transferred upon someone else. Everything else like status, career, and even morals are bound to change but our experiences have been etched in our hearts, embedded in our souls.
Shared pain, Keerthi. This makes us equals”
He kept staring at me with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher. Back then I thought he was listening intently but now I’m also speculating if that was his desperate effort to look alert when his eyelids were giving up.
“Will you marry me?,” I croaked.
He reacted to this like the sloth from Zooptopia, eyes slowly widening in surprise. He was quick to conceal it though.
“Sleep now. We’ll talk in the morning”
I had a sound sleep as Keerthi kept tossing and turning in his berth above.
