An extraordinary girl

My Husband’s Disloyalty

As I have already related, barely six months after my marriage, I returned to my mother's house in Calcutta, after I escaped from the prison-house that was my in-laws' house. But I did not cut off relations with my husband. He came to our place regularly and made it virtually his home. My mother looked after him and paid him all the attention due to a son-in-law. I was also happy, and the two of us spent much of our time together. He had finished his studies and, since he was a zamindar, had no need to work. In the evenings we would go out visiting places of interest, particularly to see animals and birds in which both of us were keenly interested. We would also take walks hand in hand around the Calcutta Lake, laughing and chatting like so many other couples. Because both of us were young and good-looking, we attracted the attention of the other strollers. Once one of my middle-aged relatives saw us and recognized me. "Are you not Esha?" she asked. "And who is this handsome young fellow?"

I smiled mischievously. "Oh, I know, I know!" she exclaimed. "He is your husband. How good-looking he is! A fine couple indeed. God bless you both!" And we parted, while my husband and I exchanged knowing glances.

The strange part was, you see, that we were comparatively free from physical desire. My husband had already told me he would like us to live like brother and sister, which delighted me, for physical intimacy had always struck me as gross.

Quite a few years passed and finally my mother asked me how it was that we had had no children. She insisted on our seeing a doctor, but when he examined the two of us he found us perfectly normal.

"What is your secret?" he asked. "Don't you want any children?"

"Not yet," I answered.

"Then why have you come to see me?" he retorted.

When after six years we did have a child, our sweet married life took a bitter and fateful turn.

Soon after I became pregnant, I noticed something strange had occurred in my relationship with my husband, though to be honest I could find no outward manifestation of it. It was a purely feminine intuition that something which had been there before was now missing between us. On the surface, he was as attentive and loving as ever, and so I tried to dismiss my feeling. I told myself that my psychological unease must be due to my pregnancy.

Then one day I was having some trouble with my eyes, and my husband arranged to take me to an eye-surgeon who was a friend of his. On the way, he suddenly said, "Don't tell him that you're my wife. Say that you are my sister."

Bewildered, I asked him why. "There are reasons," he replied. "I'll tell you about them later." I was greatly perplexed. When, after coming home, I told my mother about it, she answered, "Foolish girl, don't you see his `reason'? He must have taken another girl and introduced her as his wife and therefore you have to be his sister. It's so simple and you are so naive." I really fell from heaven. However, I kept quiet. But the matter did not end there. Soon after, a close relative of mine asked me how it was that he saw my husband waiting daily in a certain locality, and whether I knew anything of it. I replied in the negative and put the matter away from my mind. I was too preoccupied with the vomiting and nausea of morning-sickness to be bothered about it. At the same time I felt so extraordinarily hungry that I doubled my food intake. Needless to say my weight increased rapidly and I had to consult the doctor. He refused to medicate me in any way for fear of injuring the foetus, and instructed me instead to control my diet. Otherwise, he warned, the baby would grow too big and cause difficulties during the birthing — which did indeed happen.

At the same time, the situation with my husband became clearer and clearer, and soon there could be no doubt that my woman's intuition had not played me false. He had fallen in love with someone else, thus bearing out my uncle's misgivings about the character of zamindars. But unlike many other women in the same predicament, I felt no jealousy, nor any desire to sever relations with him. He continued to come to the house, and my mother received him as before. The only difference was that I could no longer bear to have any physical contact with him.

For his part, he too seemed to have retained some love for me. According to Sri Aurobindo, if I have understood him correctly, there is more than one kind of love, the psychology of love being one of the most complex. One may have genuine or true love for one person and yet the vital being may gambol about. Sri Aurobindo had remarked that I was free from attachment, and perhaps so it was with regard to my husband. I do not know whether I really loved him either. For, once, after he had a heart-attack in our house, I was having a sound sleep at night. My mother came and woke me up saying, "What's this? Get up, get up! What will people say? While they are attending on him, you are sleeping!"