I met a Man...

He must be half my height!

Alright, exaggeration!
Correction: He must be a little more than half my height.
Age: No more than 23 years would be my guess.
A calm in his eyes turns his otherwise seemingly ordinary face into a captivating sight.
His bright orange shirt tends to make him look darker than he actually is.
And something about the whole air around him tends to make him (much) taller than he actually is.

As I sat alone at McDonald’s today, waiting for my friend R and his friend D, I thought there were a couple of pairs of eyes which kept screening me from time to time (for whatever reasons). That got confirmed when R & D entered, and I waved at R. The curious couples of pairs of eyes turned most apparently in their direction to know who the awaited was. And no sooner had they seen the 2 guys that their faces registered a most obvious expression of amusement.

I happen to be taller than R and D. They’re the kind of guys who have a boy-like quality about them as against man-like (this quality also includes as one of its facets, what they must be doing as they read this – Hating it!). And I’m the kind of girl who has a woman-like quality about her however much she might try to be girl-like. [Quick EFT: Even though I seem like a mature woman, I choose to feel like a young girl ;-)]

McDonald’s was apparently not the best of places for the kind of conversation I’d have liked to have with D. R, showing as much brightness as D’s orange shirt, pointed this out and consequently, drove us to a more peaceful and spacious place, albeit a bit far.

And so, in between crunchy bites of Aloo Tikki Chat and fishing for the Chilli Cauliflower in the pool of onion and tomato dressing, I got to catch small pieces from D’s rather unusual trip on his life journey. His story could actually be straight out of a movie, just that nobody would make that movie in India, for it would challenge every milligram of ‘our culture and sensibility’ right from ‘masses’ to ‘classes’.

The boyish D is a married man. His sweetheart of eight years is now his lawfully wedded wife. And their love seems nowhere near the fizzle-out phase. Their cell phones are their lifelines. And they, clearly, are each other’s lives.

The twist, however, is that D and his wife, even though they’re in the same city, don’t live together. Her family is not aware that she is married. His family is, but they couldn’t care less about anything to do with him anymore. He doesn’t live with them either.

Her family, when they had discovered about their relationship a few years ago, had been scandalized, and she had been barred from keeping in touch with him. They still live under a happy misconception that she has no contact with him whatsoever – he, who is actually now her husband.

6 days from now… they’re going to celebrate their first anniversary. D has been thinking the time to be ripe for the indispensable revelation to her family. I don’t notice a frown on his face as he says or thinks about it. However, I can feel deep burrows on my own forehead.

Aren’t you scared? – I ask him. There are countless instances of couples being made to go through hell for going against their family’s wishes. Sometimes even killed. (Touch wood). D’s is anyway such an unusual affair. Why can’t I see fear on his face? He brushes away the question as he bites into a cauliflower – “Whatever has to happen will happen. What’s the point in being scared? We’ll see what happens”.

At that instant, I ask myself – Is this guy a fool? Or is he too carefree? Shouldn’t he at least be scared for the girl he loves? What if some trouble falls upon her? I can’t stop myself from asking him this last question. And his expression changes instantly.

“Of course I worry for her. But then, is there an alternative except facing it? And if we have to do that anyway, what’s the point in being worried endlessly about it now? We’ll die when it’s written for us to die. And there’ll be no changing that”.

It is now that I notice his eyes. Besides the peace that pervades his entire persona, there is an unmistakable reflection in them of something that can only be – Courage. His whole story is that of courage. He hasn’t had it easy in life. A number countable on fingers, in the name of ‘family’; and that too, just for the name’s sake. Decades of being trapped, of being hopeless. Mountainous days still lying ahead of him. And despite all that (or maybe because of it), he is the bravest person sitting on this table right now.

Not only because it must have taken him an immense amount of strength to live for years and years in a body that was not even his own.
Not only because he would have had to endure countless days of being taunted and laughed at for being a tomboy.
Not only because he chose his own body last year with nobody in the world except his now-wife waiting for the news from the operation theatre.
Not only because he has the courage to take head-on whatever comes his way on this path of love, even though he might not have the physical strength for it.

But most above all, because he has fought with and won over the demons that lived inside him… something that most ordinary inhabitants of this planet struggle to do until their last breath.

I salute you, D. And even though I haven’t met her, I salute your wife.