10.08.2002 | 12:17 p.m.
white-bread madness.

The pieces don't fit. The protrusion of the person's life doesn't fit into the groove of her actions. The story is being screwed around with. Everyone was so ready to accept the faux truth. He was seriously involved with another woman and that's why she asked him for a divorce. The villianous nature of a man will never be doubted. The quintessential suburban Indian family can only be torn apart by cheating husbands. It will never occur to the onlookers that the wife might be insane. Clinically insane. Because that's not possible. She was brought up in a respectable middle-class family. Her father was a patron of the Gujarati stage. She started going out with the man of her dreams in college; the two of them were inseperable and eventually got married. They had two beautiful children who they took out of town every weekend. Mental illness is not an option here. Not once did she make fish faces at passers-by.

And yet this is the same woman who screamed and threatened to call the cops when her husband tried to hug her. Sex became a non-existent part of their marriage and all the melodrama was dismissed as post-natal depression. She grew obsessed with her children and used them as an effective excuse to ignore her husband. Any sign of affection was answered with hysteria and pot and pans flying in every direction. The children crouched behind doors and watched their mother speedily undoing the lives she had helped in constructing. Craving both love and sanity, he got involved with a woman he worked with. He confessed this to his wife immediately and all she had to say was, "Do what you want. As long as you don't touch me or interfere in my life." They stayed together for the sake of their children. In the same bed without once touching each other. One knowingly dreamt of new found love while the other unknowingly dreamt of stability.

Years took shape in the same mould until Eric came into her life and bent it all out of recognition. She lusted after him - the art director for the magazine she and her husband ran - but all she was to him was the boss's wife. She wrote pornographic stories based on her love for him and sent them to Penguin for publication. When they were returned, she declared her talent would be recognised only posthumously. She stalked him etching "I love you,Eric." numerous times on his door, causing his landlord to throw him out, writing letters to him saying she was willing to give up her family for him. In one of these letters, she referred to herself as his wife. She had said her vows in Church, with Our Lady as witness, and even though he wasn't physically there, she had felt his presence. They were good as married in the mind, but married in the mind's no good. When she found out he was engaged, she hounded the girl and threatened her so much, she killed herself. Eric left the job and filed a police complaint against her but she wasn't repulsed. She knew exactly why he didn't reciprocate her feelings.

"My breasts are too small." she told her husband. "That's the only reason he doesn't love me." Desperate to appease her, he paid for silicon implants to augment her breasts. And when that didn't work either, she told her children she wished she had never given birth to them. The fact that she was a married woman with children intimidated him. One night, Eric called her husband desperately. "It's an emergency." he screamed into the phone. "Come here immeditely." A kind of clairvoyance possessed her husband and with him, he took his children, and his father-in-law. When they reached, Eric's mother was sobbing and he was trying to calm her down. "Come look what she's done..." he said to her family. Her husband, her aged father, her 12 year old son, her 10 year old daughter. He led them into his house and to the window. When they looked out,they saw her - their wife, their daughter, their mother - curled up on the narrow ledge underneath. "I'm not going to jump!" she assured them. "I just want to be close to my Eric." They hauled her up kicking and screaming, and begged her to get help. She said for Eric she would do anything. The next day, she accused the psychiatrist of projecting his insanity on her. Embarassed by the commotion and genuinely frightened of her psychosis, Eric and his mother left town, making sure they were untraceable. After years of living in a loveless farce of a marriage, she asked for a divorce. But she continued to live in the same house as her husband and his lover.

(To be continued)

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