Friday, March 07, 2014

Bridging "Across Forever"

Married to a freelance film maker, I hardly had any time with my husband as he toiled day and night and most weekends to meet deadlines and chase payments. This was in the eighties and most of the nineties and he had to cover the long, nerve racking, dusty distances of Delhi's sprawl on our old Java. 

With the 2000s, he was settling down a bit but he is restless at heart and, in next to no time, he was back to freelancing after a stint at a desk job.
The times were hard and, when he was selected for an Intergovernmental job in Malaysia, he took it up. I stayed back as I had others to think of for whom the move overseas was not to prove so easy. 

It was something like six months of long distance love and plenty of heartache as, though he had not been home much in the earlier years, something is always better than nothing. I could at least get that bear hug however late he got home at night.

When I was in college, Leo Sayer sang to me
The telephone can't take the place of your smile


Skype love is often more frustrating than soothing.

However, nothing but nothing stands in the way of true love and, with all problems smoothed out, I joined him in Kuala Lumpur where we lived for some five years. Five years in the sweet land of love and gentleness and amazing food! 

Yet, home is where the heart is and India is my home, my heart and the day came when we returned and it was sheer bliss to be back, to be engulfed in the mind boggling diversity, where every sense comes alive, the mind is always challenged by a myriad issues, where a gazillion beautiful eyes sparkle at you even when you are just one in a billion, and where you can see cows on busy highways and monkeys and donkeys and where children can make joyous noise and the neighbour can barge in whenever. This is home! And I love every second of it!

But! Sayer may sing
Honey that's a heavy load that we bear
But you know I won't be traveling a lifetime
 Some people just can't gather no moss and, after about thirty years of being married to him, I can safely say that the man I love cannot grow roots! I enjoy traveling with him, leading a semi nomadic life and never taking tomorrow for granted and I've learned to love his dreams. 

Over the years I've seen my dreamer's dreams come true-a film on this, a book on that, such and such project and so many other things. 
And that is why I know that one day we'll be flying to the land of the midnight sun to get a ringside view of the Northern Lights!

That's how far I'll go to get closer to the man I love. It's my promise to the next solar maxima and to my beloved husband.

2 comments:

Prasanna Karmarkar said...

What a lovely piece!

Gita Madhu said...

Thanks! Hope I can keep that promise