Fights and Feuds…

July 2, 2009 at 4:02 pm (husbands, marriage, nostalgia, Uncategorized, women)

The doorbell rang as I was racing against time to finish an assignment. My son was napping and I prayed he wouldn’t wake up and ruin my efforts to catch a deadline.  For once.

H, a friend stood outside my door.

Her forehead was smeared with so much kumkum that it looked like she’d emptied a dubba on herself.

I invited her in and ran back to the comp.

She dragged a chair and sat next to me.

“I walked out of home,” she informed me.

“Why?”

“I fought with my husband”

“So what’s new?! ” I asked. ” you keep talking… just don’t expect me to say anything till I send this mail… ”

She rattled on about the arguement she’d had with her husband (which was so petty, I can’t even tell you…)

I half-listened and made all the appropriate noises.

I finished my work and we lounged in the sofa with a cup of tea each.

She’d just told me how she had walked all morning from one temple to another to get some peace of mind… She was sure her husband must have been having hell trying to handle both their boisterous kids when the doorbell rang again.

This time it was her driver.

She looked at me flummoxed.

I just shrugged.

The driver informed her that his master was downstairs waiting for her in the car.

“Tell him I’m not coming..” She said haughtily.

“Ma’m… I’ll lose my job.. you please tell him whatever you want to yourself…”

She looked at me…

“Your man is smart..” I told her. ” He knows exactly where you’ll be when you run away from home!”

After dragging her feet for another ten minutes, she sheepishly said her goodbyes and went back to her waiting husband…

*******

Fights in a marriage is as common as cold, I think… I have my share of them too… But over the years they’ve tapered down to a curt word here, a killer looks there and we just get on with our lives.

I remember the first time we had a fight as newly-weds. After a bitter argument and a healthy blame-game session, my husband stormed out after yelling he didn’t want dinner.

I threw myself on the bed, cried into my pillow and ignored my own grumbling tummy for the better part of the night.

The next time, we had just sat down to dinner and I was ravenous.

But my husband who was suffering from a bad cold was mad at me for the chilled curds at the table.  How could I be so inconsiderate?

I told him he’d been avoiding curds for the past few days and the chilled curds were for me.

He walked off in a huff.

I looked at the food in my plate.

Then I looked at his sulking silhouette in the balcony.

My hunger won. I ate my dinner and retreated to the bedroom and watched some TV.

But the dishes on the table bothered me.

So I went up to him and asked him ” Aren’t you going to finish your dinner?”

“NO!”  he barked. “I told you I will not eat!”

“OK” I said. I cleared the table, cleaned the kitchen and went back to bed. After a bit of channel surfing, I drifted off to a peaceful slumber for the next eight hours.

And the next day my husband was back to normal, talking about the weather!

Having stumbled upon this brilliant way of handling a fight by sheer accident, I’ve stuck to it all these years …

But of course there was this odd incident when I was overcome with so much anger that I tried a filmy style walkout late in the night. (We were staying in a very quiet and lonely neighborhood then)

I was sure my husband would follow me with a thousand apologies, but when it didn’t happen, I quickly backtracked to find him glowering at the door.

I got an earful for being so foolish and how I could have got mugged or raped or walked into so many such nasty situations.

Anyway, now both of us don’t waste our energies  yelling or screaming. And now we cannot afford to raise our voices in front of the kid. (Thanks to all those advice you get on child rearing, free or otherwise!)

So its clipped comments, curt nods and murderous looks for us. And after a bit we just carry on with our normal lives.

I think such small fights add spice to any marriage. Imagine if  we all had predictable, happy and peaceful conversations with our spouses all the time… It’d be like having plate after plate of syrupy jaangiri! Absolutely no spice!!!

And one of my favourite stories is about a good friend when she was a newly-wed.

She stormed out after a fight, stopped at a wine shop, got herself a bottle of vodka, went over to a friend’s place, stayed up cursing all men the whole night. This was before the mobile phone days. The next morning she returned home to find an anxious husband, who’d been worried sick all night and had been just about to call the cops. He was so relieved to see her safe & sound that they had a tearful reunion on the spot!