The Woman I Thought I Knew

 I met her at a party. Somehow, we found ourselves talking to each other for a long time. From everything I understood that evening, she was single, and there seemed nothing unusual about two people discovering that they enjoyed each other's company.

She was a very good poet, while I knew practically nothing about poetry. Yet, in her eyes, I was a good writer.

She had many interests. She loved helping people, particularly poor children. She enjoyed cooking and going out with friends. My own interests were rather different—reading newspapers and magazines and playing table tennis, hobbies that might have appeared rather uninteresting to others.

Her friends used to call her “Devi”, though I never addressed her by that name.

As we were leaving for home that evening, she handed me her business card. It had her mobile number on it.

I wanted to call her, but stopped myself.

A thought held me back: she is such a beautiful woman; what if she thinks I have fallen for her?

The truth, of course, was that I had.

Before I could gather enough courage to call her, my phone rang.

It was her.

“Kumar ji, are you never going to take me out for coffee?”

For a few moments, words deserted me. It was almost as though I had slipped into a coma. Somehow gathering myself, I finally managed to say, “Why not?”

“Where shall we meet?” I asked.

“Do I have to tell you that as well?” she replied.

I suggested that we meet at the Holiday Inn in an hour.

An hour later, we met. After shaking hands, we began talking—and simply kept talking.

One coffee became another, and then another.

We had already had three cups before we realised that it was time for dinner.

“We might as well have dinner before leaving,” I suggested.

She nodded.

While we were eating, she suddenly said, “I can cook much better food than this. And I am not going to let you eat outside. Just call me and tell me what you want to eat. I will cook it for you.”

I couldn't quite understand what she was trying to tell me.

She looked at me.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. “You're wondering why I would cook for you, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Oh! I thought you loved me and were going to propose marriage to me.”

For perhaps the first time in my life, I discovered the writer inside me desperately searching for words—and finding none.

I sat there silently, looking at her face, unable to decide what I should say.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “If you don't like me that way, we will remain good friends.”

Suddenly, I felt like a child watching someone take away his most precious toy.

Without thinking any further, I took her hand in mine.

“Yes,” I said. “I want to marry you.”

I often think about her remarkable personality.

She could be extremely mischievous in conversation, yet her ability to judge and understand people was so precise that she could leave the person sitting opposite her astonished.

She possessed another remarkable ability as a writer: she could beautifully synchronise her thoughts with her emotions.

She liked keeping everyone around her happy. Apart from writing, cooking was one of her great pleasures. During that very first date, I began to realise that beneath the beauty of her words lay an extraordinary ability to observe and understand human nature.

Her words could be filled with tremendous emotion, but her writing seemed always to be searching for truth within the conflicts and complexities of human relationships.

She believed that love was a force capable of relieving tension and emotional distress.

For her, the words “I love you, and I am there for you” were among the most beautiful things one human being could say to another, because such words could emerge only from love.

Love, she believed, gives us the strength to face adversity. It makes difficult roads easier. When you know that somebody is standing beside you, even the hardest journey becomes a little easier.

She often reflected on the deeper meaning of relationships between two people.

Human relationships, in her view, could not simply be reduced to conscious thought. Love could continue to exist even when it was not consciously expressed or acknowledged. Emotion could sometimes possess a force greater than our conscious understanding of it.

She regarded love not merely as an emotion, but as a way of looking at another human being. Every such perspective, she believed, revealed something about the nature of a relationship.

“Look at the love of Damayanti and Nala,” she would say, “or Romeo and Juliet.”

Whatever perspective one adopted, she believed that love could continue to exist even when it remained unseen. It was this invisible emotional connection that made human relationships possible.

She once gave me a wonderfully simple example.

Love, she said, is the force that makes birds collect one tiny straw after another to build their nests.

Birds have never studied architecture. They have never attended a course in engineering or house construction. Yet they create beautiful little homes for their young.

What teaches them to do it?

Love.

That is the power of love.

Perhaps it is through love that we ultimately begin to understand human relationships.

Sometimes, she believed, we imagine that we are seeing something completely when, in reality, we are seeing only a part of it. Reality itself exists beyond our immediate consciousness of it.

And therefore, she believed, it is not enough merely to be aware.

We must also be aware that we are aware.

Those words stayed with me.

Perhaps because, sometime later, I discovered something about her that I had never known during all those conversations about love, relationships and truth.

She was married.

And she was the mother of a five-year-old daughter.

I remember thinking back to that party.

To the business card she had placed in my hand.

To the telephone call I had been too hesitant to make.

To her voice asking, “Kumar ji, are you never going to take me out for coffee?”

To the three cups of coffee.

To the dinner.

And, most of all, to the moment when she had looked across the table and said:

“Oh! I thought you loved me and were going to propose marriage to me.”

I had believed what I knew about her.

Perhaps she had believed what she said about love.

Perhaps there were parts of her life, her circumstances and her emotions that I had never understood.

Years later, I still do not believe that every story needs a judgement attached to it.

I can tell what happened.

I can tell what I knew.

And I can tell what I came to know later.

Who was right, who was wrong, what was love and what was not—I would rather not decide that for anyone.

Perhaps the rest does not belong to the writer.

It belongs to the reader.