The Second Marriage
ALTHOUGH ONE OF THEM lived in Kensington and the other in Bayswater, they didn’t know each other. It was that evening, when he’d come out of the underground and walked down the road glittering with light and rain, and gone back home to speak to his parents on the telephone, that he’d first heard about her. A second marriage! What was marriage, after all? The back of his overcoat was velvety with moisture as it lay drying on the sofa, where it had been roughly put aside. Once, after a couple of meetings, it was agreed that the idea of a second marriage was congenial to both of them, they decided to put it to execution. They had no idea, really, what it was all about; members of both sides of the family became like coconspirators, and decided to keep the fact a secret till they had an inkling as to what the shape and features of a second marriage were. As far as they were concerned, it was still as formless as the rain on Kensington High Street. Last time, the rituals, like some vast fabric whose provenance they knew little about, had woven them into the marriage, without their having to enquire deeply into it; Arun remembered, from long ago, the car that had come to pick him up, his eyes smarting with the smoke from the fire, the web of flowers over everything, including the bed, the stage, even the car. The first marriage had been like a book into which everyone, including they, had been written, melding unconsciously and without resistance into the characters in it that everyone was always supposed to be.
They met at an old pub near Knightsbridge, and ordered two coffees. This time Prajapati, or Brahma, would not preside with wings unfurled from the sky or the dark over their marriage; nor would this wedding be in that ageless lineage that had begun when Shiva had importunately stormed in to marry Parvati. This time the gods would be no more than an invisible presence between their conversation. They sat there, two individuals, rather lonely, both carrying their broken marriages like the rumours of children.
“Sugar?” she said, with the air of one who was conversant with his habits. He was shyer than she was, as if he needed to prove something.
“Two,” he said, managing to sound bold and nervous at once.
They were like two film directors who had with them a script, a plan, but nothing else. There was both exhaustion and hope in their eyes and gestures, which the waitress, saying “Thank you!” cheerfully, hadn’t noticed.
“Two?” she said, noting that he was overweight. A gentle affection for him had preceded, in her, any permanent bond. It was as if it would almost not matter if they never saw each other again.
“Are you all right?” said the waitress, coming back after a while.
“Oh, we’re fine!” he said, his English accent impeccable. “Maybe you could bring me a few cookies.” The cookies were pale star-shaped squiggles, or chocolate-dark circles. They had brought a list of invitees with them.
“This is Bodo Jethu,” she said, pointing at the name, “A. Sarkar,” on the top of a piece of paper. “You’ll see him during the ashirbaad at Calcutta.” Withdrawing her finger and looking at a name, she said, “That’s my only mama.” He stared at the name she was looking at.
Six years ago, these very people, six years younger, had blessed her at the ashirbaad ceremony before her first marriage. Now they would have to be summoned again, like figures brought to life a second time from a wooden panel where they’d been frozen, resurrected from their armchairs, or old-age homes, or holiday resorts, or wherever they happened to be. The embarrassment, the fatigue, of blessing a niece, or a grandniece, or a daughter, a second time! Some of them had developed a few aches and pains, inexorably, since the first time; though all of them were still there. Now they’d be brought back like soldiers that had been disbanded and were caught loitering happily and absently.
But the list of invitees, this time round, was to be a more makeshift affair. It had the air of an impressionistic personal reminiscence; it had been composed, without much advice from elders, haltingly, from memory. “Might as well put him there” and “Don’t you have anyone else on your father’s side of the family?” were the expressions of collaboration and trade heard being made across the coffee cups, smudged with marks from their lips, on the table. Last time, the list of invitees in both cases had been all-encompassing; almost all the people who populated their lives on a long-term basis had come. This time, only a handful were to come; some people had been left out mysteriously, for no good reason; others were the most essential, the kind of people they’d have chosen to take with them to a nuclear-free zone, in case of a war, if they were offered the choice.
In everything they said, there was this air of acceptance and tentative experimentation rather than celebration, of a resolve towards provisionality rather than finality; since they themselves, rather than tradition, authority, or destiny, were having to author this event, they were experiencing the difficulty that authors have, of bringing into existence what didn’t exist before. In Arpita, especially, there was a deep sadness, not so much because she was attached to her ex-husband, whom she hated, but because she realised the marriage ceremony has only one incarnation, it has no second birth or afterlife, that the fire cannot be lit again, consumed and charred as it had been by ghee, nor the garlands re-exchanged, except in memory, where it can be played again and again, like a videotape. Whose wedding was that, then, six years ago, and whose wedding was it to be now? There was a subtle disjuncture between meaning and reality. In the meanwhile, they, while considering the idea of the wedding and the marriage, were having to behave like visitors from a remote planet who were studying the civilizations of this one from a book, and finding their habits increasingly difficult to put to use.
Later, after he’d paid the three pounds and fifty — there was a brief discussion about who should have the right to pay, till it was decided that it was not so much a question of rights as of who had the change — they took a tube (both of them had taken the day off from the office) to Highgate, and walked down from there to Hampstead Heath. There were two or three preponderant clouds in the sky, which were being gradually pushed beyond their field of vision by a breeze, but there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger of rain. The Heath was largely tourist-less and deserted except for a few devout ramblers and the usual conference of ducks and a few expatiating, unidentifiable birds that, as they walked, had the strangely private and liberated air of tramps. They went to take a look, from the outside, at the old, stately home where they would have their reception in London — they could well afford it; they each earned more than fifty thousand pounds a year — after the ashirbaad and reception in Calcutta. They were too well dressed to be loiterers or intruders, Arun in his usual overcoat, Arpita in her slacks and her dark blue duffel coat. An onlooker, looking at them looking at the stately home, might have concluded they’d come here to attend a function, only to discover they’d arrived on the wrong day.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” he said, dazzled by the sunlight mutely reflecting on the wooden door.