Bitter-Sweet memories

Sometimes life puts challenges in front of you and you have to deal with those. If you succumb to the pressure and cannot deal with it then you are weak. The more you face them, the stronger you get. There is a proverb in Sanskrit that brass and gold both glisten, so what is the difference between the two? When put to test under intense heat, brass burns but gold becomes even brighter.

This month marks my ten years in this country. I came to the United States in August 2000 to pursue my graduate studies at the University of Michigan. In my mind this year was a breakthrough, as for the first time in my life I realized my self-worth. When I came here, I was an architect who had practiced for a few years and I was a wife. Most importantly I was extremely attached to my family so it was difficult for me to leave them along with my husband in India. Yes, it was my ambition to pursue further education but I was also facing some difficulties in India. It has been ten years and I have moved on so I will not use this blog for anything negative.

Sustaining a happy and healthy marriage is always work in progress. Sometimes you have your great days and many other times you don’t. K and I have been together for many years. Today I would say our relationship has reached a level of understanding, mutual respect and comfort. This period of separation, I would say, was the most trying period of our life. I have saved all the emails that we have exchanged and I read them from time to time. They remind me of the hardships and the uncertainties we faced then. Most importantly they remind me of how our mutual respect and trust helped us sustain this relationship! There are times when I get very annoyed with K, and reading those emails makes me realize how valuable his presence is in my life.

I came here sometime in August 2000 and started rooming with two other women. K had warned me about sharing an apartment with strangers as I had not done that before and it is especially difficult if one is married and has had her own home. I didn’t want to live alone in a foreign country and preferred Indian roommates because of the shared ethnicity. NOT A GREAT IDEA! Within two days I realized that I was so naïve and lived such a sheltered life in India. I used to miss K a lot and felt very insecure that he might just leave me. I wanted to go back to India and hold on to my life there. I had such conflicting emotions, on one hand I wanted to realize my dreams, but on the other I wanted to hold on to my personal life as well. This was before Skype and Reliance India service so it was expensive communicating with him in India. We still managed to speak three to four times a week.

My cousin and his wife, who live in Chicago, took it upon themselves to help me set up the apartment. I showed them around the beautiful campus. My cousin’s wife, a Ph.D in Physics and a stay at home mom at that time, realized how sad and lonely I looked. She advised that I should enjoy being a student again as very few Indian women, especially married ones, got such an opportunity. She said that not everyone had supportive spouses like I did. Actually that statement made it worse for me as it fed on my insecurity that my supportive spouse could potentially leave me…out of sight and out of mind!

My cousin’s family and I had a picnic at Gallup Park, which is Ann Arbor’s most popular recreation area. My cousin’s mother, i.e. my father’s brother’s widow, was visiting from India so was with us as well. My uncle had passed on a few months prior to that. After lunch my cousin and his wife took the kids bike riding while I sat with my aunt quietly enjoying the bucolic landscape. She asked me how I was faring and I said I was well but missed India and K. Suddenly she burst into tears and I held her close. She is a lady of few words but I realized that she must be missing my late uncle. The last time she was here, he was with her and now she was alone. That is the time I realized that although K and I were separated by two continents and a 10.5 hour difference we were still able to communicate with each other. For the first time I realized how difficult it must have been for her to be alone after 40 odd years of togetherness. My trepidations and worries seemed so trivial then. I realized that I was indeed given an opportunity to do what I wanted to do and that I should make the most out of it instead of imagining the worst! It is weird that I am writing about this now. It is just that I happened to read one of my old emails and all these memories came flooding back.