PART 1 : WHEN REENA MARRIED JASON - Notes on a Marriage
Megha Malhar Ballroom, Hotel Soaltee, Kathmandu
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"Throw the lawa in the fire" Shankar, the priest solemnizing the ceremony quickly grinned at those around him, amused at his own English, as he ordered the groom and bride to perform the age old wedding ritual of worshiping the fire god . They had decided to have a watered down Hindu wedding ceremony to be completed in no more than an hour in Kathmandu and a US-style reception in San Francisco upon their return to the US. Reena and Jason promptly followed the priests orders as family members and guests looked on - the groom's with curiosity and polite smiles, the bride's with visible traces of boredom on their faces.
"I like this idea of a short-cut marriage" opined Arun uncle, husband of Reena's mother's best friend. "It's so quick, no hassles, saves time and money not to mention having to stay up all night if the sahit is at some ungodly hour"
"It is easy to say that when it is someone else's daughter" Kamala aunty rebuked Arun uncle "I would want my daughter to get married with full rites and rituals. Sharmila didi's son did a short-cut too and they got divorced in less than a year. Sharmila di is regretting it to this day" Her tone was hushed perhaps because she did not want anyone to find out how superstitious she really was about weddings.
This was one of numerous side conversations going on as the bride and groom sat cross-legged in the jagya. In some sense this was a typical upper-class, upper caste Nepali wedding. Or at least how such weddings were turning out to be those days amongst the privileged few. The fire in the jagya was fueled by spoon-fulls of ghee thrown in every two minutes or so by the main priest or his assistant as they took turns to chant Vedic hymns. The five pheras were performed at a quick pace with a long silk scarf tied on one end to Reena's lehenga and to Jason's finger on the other. A shortened Kanya dan followed and the ceremony was complete in exactly one hour and five minutes. A reception with a guest list that resembled the country's who-is-who followed.
It was a wedding to remember and bridge and groom were happy and madly in love.
***
Lunch room, MacKanZoo and Company, Hong Kong
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Jason was introduced to Reena in the lunch room of their Hong Kong office. He was a fellow associate at the LA office of their word-famous management consulting firm. Diversity was greatly valued at the firm: you didn't have to go to Harvard or Stanford to join the company, you could be from Kellog or Wharton too. And in the operations department, they were even taking in UCLA grads. Or so the joke went amongst the company's detractors and those who never got to sneak their foot past the door.
Both Reena and Jason were on the same two-week project in Hong Kong. Jason's good looks struck Reena the moment they were introduced but she did not give it more than a passing thought as her mind was deeply engrossed in the contents of a power point presentation on the impact of global capital markets on government policy.
Hong Kong is a beautiful city but when you are several thousand miles away from home and you have visited every tourist spot that you possibly can on a business trip, evenings and weekends even in a vibrant city like this can get dull. So when Reena ran into Jason at the elevator of their hotel that weekend, she had a sudden urge to ask Jason what he was doing that night. For some reason she did not. Both checked their work emails instead, ordered room service and turned out the bedside lights in their respective rooms.
A week later, they were seated in Cathay Pacific business class enroute to San Francisco. After what had transpired during the remainder of the week, they could only but ask to be re-seated next to each other on the flight. Jason's smile gave her the butterflies and her calm and composed nature fascinated him in more ways than he was willing to admit.
***
The Bickford residence, Russian Hill, San Francisco
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You don't fall in love in a week. No matter how great a person is. And not when you are 26 and 28 years. It took them longer than that. After about 2 years of seeing each other, visits to probably every restaurant listed on Zagat, fun-filled vacations and countless sleep-overs at Jason's place followed by made up stories and coverups with her family on the phone, Jason finally proposed. Reena had never wanted to say yes so badly to anything in her entire life. She was the happiest Senior Associate of Strategy Consulting anywhere in the world.
She had never been so happy in her life. She felt so complete and content. She had the perfect job and the perfect life and was the envy of her friends and sometimes the subject of their sharp tongues.
***
University of California, San Francisco Medical Center
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Tragedy had never struck Reena before in her life for which she was truly thankful. That was soon to come to an end and when it did strike, it struck hard. Eileen Arati Bickford would have been born 18 months after the wedding. They had taken out a huge mortgage to get ready for what was about to come and were thinking of getting her room ready when their worst nightmares came true. She blamed her busy schedule and crazy hours and the resulting stress for a miscarriage so late into the pregnancy.
It was a day of blood and tears. Jason, normally a composed and laid back person, was visibly shaken when he saw the expression of devastation in her face in the hospital room that night. Denial soon gave way to mourning. Mourning would give way to healing. Or so everyone hoped.
***
Dr Talwar's office, Sausalito, CA
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Eileen decided to see Dr Ashwini Talwar on the recommendation of Triveni Kaur, a co-worker who had gone through relationship problems in her own inter-racial marriage.
The waiting room in the counselors office was empty except for an old man sitting in the corner. On more than one occasion she wondered what she was doing there and the thought of escaping down the back stairs crossed her mind.
"Tell me how you are feeling?" Dr Talwar's question seemed tougher than any she had faced in a boardroom or seminar. The president of the elocution club in high school felt a slight tremor in her legs just the way she had when she forgot a sentence she had learned by rote in the seventh grade.
Reena was miserable. She felt a deep melancholy piercing her from the inside. Jason suddenly seemed so fake. Nothing he said or did was authentic anymore. He hadn't really changed, yet he was so different. He was running around the country working with big-name clients just like he had always done. At times, he seemed to be making too much of an effort to love her. After Reena got pregnant, he was either home during the weekends when he was working with out-of-town clients or by 6 PM when he was based in the local office. In fact it was he who had picked her up from work a couple of times when Reena was in the office chasing tight deadlines and aggressive project plans. After the miscarriage she felt a void of sorts develop between them yet she chose to hide those feelings from him for reasons she was too afraid to admit. Day in and day out she tried her best to make things seem as normal as possible.
"I am fine, I think" she replied and managed an unconvincing smile.
"Is there anything bothering you?" Dr. Talwar maintained a detached tone in her speech.
"I don't know". But she knew. She was just too scared to put it into words. The consequences of doing so, she feared, would bring her world crashing down. It would expose her for what she was behind that facade of a forward-thinking, open-minded, Ivy-League-league management consultant with a multi-million dollar home, a handsome husband and a 1049 form that would make many eyes pop. She was an utter failure behind that mask. A coward running away from the demons of her nature. And she did not want anyone to find out.
"I hate this life, I hate America, I hate Americans, I hate everything about this place" she broke down into tears three weeks after the first session and $5000 dollars and some spare change later. Everything around her seemed fake. The smiles on the faces of people who passed her in the hallways who could care less about how she really felt, the neighbors who waved at her as she backed her car out of the driveway, but had never invited her over ever, or whom she never got to build the kind of relationship she could with her neighbors back home - something seemed amiss in this place. The "friends" she had come to make over the years seemed more concerned about being seen at the right places, with the right clothes, sipping the right wines than about laughing and having a good time.
"I want to go back home" she felt a tremendous relief as she let those words out. It was something she could never bring herself to tell Jason. She grew up in a nuclear family in Nepal but missed the joint family environment of some of her cousins. She missed the love and warmth of her grandparents who had passed away when she was away from home and neither of whose funerals she could attend because of that challenging project she was working on. There was a part of her that would wake up some mornings and still think they were alive. If anyone else I love passes away, I will attend their funerals from now on, she promised herself. I will always say my final goodbye she would weep to herself at times.
Her grandparents had visited a year before her grandmother died. She had bitter sweet memories of the incident. She loved the moments she got to spend with them but felt a pang of guilt about how they must have felt. She could not take them to the finest restaurants in town because they would feel out of place there. Her grandfather spoke English, but with a slight accent, and her grand mother could manage only the bare minimum words needed to get one past custom and immigrations. She could not showcase her grandparents, the pride of her life, amongst her new circle. She could not bare to see the looks of polite disdain that might appear on the faces of some people when they saw the shy and wrinkled faces of two foreigners. So what if his title once read " His Excellency, the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of Nepal to ...." The list would have been quite long of she had to go through it all.
There were things she had come to learn about how San Francisco's famed egalitarian and progressive society viewed others that would make her clench her teeth. Her grandfather, ever the adventurer, wanted to drive her SUV, and even got an international drivers license from nepal when he came to visit. When he brought it up with her, the phrase "DWI - Driving While Asian" was what she immediately thought of. A term used to refer to the driving skills old chinese ladies and men. Fear, and not the lack os skills, was responsible for such driving she wanted to yell whenever she heard that phrase because in some ways it reminded her of her own grandparents. She had brought up the issue with Jason but he gave his characteristic shrug by which he meant "Ya, fine" but by which she understood "I can help you integrate into my society but your whole family is not my problem".
Her grandfather never got to drive in America.
The sessions continued.
"If you could go back and change what you did, what are some of the things you would change" Dr Talwar scribbled something on her notepad as she asked the question.
***
San Francisco Superior Court, San Francisco
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Citing an irretrievable breakdown of marriage and stipulating that the terms of the settlement be carried out within 180 days, the court spent less than 15 minutes granting the divorce. Reena then took her dad to have his favorite cup of capuchino at the local Peet's Coffee while her mom complained about how bitter the "American" coffee was.
Reena felt a burden had been lifted off her shoulders. Only the presence of her parents stopped her from throwing her shoes into the sky and jumping. It had been one hell of a struggle convincing them that she was doing the right thing and even though they agreed to go along, she still sensed an unease in them that disturbed her. In fact it angered her. Why were they not taking part in celebrating her new found freedom, her second chance in life? Why did they have to look at divorce as doom?
But she was too happy to let her parent's thoughts dampen her spirits. She added an extra sachet of brown sugar to her coffee, stirred it and nibbled on her chocolate biscotti and she looked out at the majestic San Francisco Bay and smiled.
"Do you have a minute? " she typed into her phone and hit the "Send" menu playfully.
" Ke chha? " came the reply in a few seconds "For you I have a life time :D"
