A common love story
“Two souls with but a single thought, Two hearts that beat as one”-John Keats
“Well, it all started with a single look”, says Anita, while I listened intently, sipping over a well-made cup of hot tea. Anita was the head housekeeper at this school that I used to work in for two years. She was nothing much to look at, wheat-skin, dark hair, Mongolian features, but it was her smile that attracted people the most. She had a charming personality, ready to help anyone with her million watts smile, always referring to herself as the male gender due to her weak Hindi. But she was still really fun to talk to and almost a polar opposite from her husband, Raju. And when I came to know that they had a love marriage, I was intrigued.
Raju and Anita both came from lower-middle-class families, though they were from completely different states. Anita hailed from the north-eastern side of India, and had a working knowledge of Assamese, Bengali, and Hindi, while Raju came from Andhra Pradesh and only knew how to speak Telugu. Both of them were uneducated, and working menial jobs at other people’s houses was the only thing they were good at. Raju was a very intense man, dark-skinned and rarely smiling, more like the angry young man type. Coming from such different places, I thought it must have been very hard for them to even come together.
But the twist in this story came when Raju was hired by his current employer at a school. The headmistress, who also owned the school, needed a very reliable man to look after everything, both in her home and her school. And she found that person in Raju. For a few years, Raju had worked for his boss, working all kinds of jobs. From cooking and cleaning to chauffeuring, he used to do everything. “There was not a single job that Raju could not do”, Anita said, “from plumbing to carpentry to all kinds of repair”. The headmistress began to rely on him so much that he was almost like her right hand.
Anita, in the meantime, had gained a reputation for being a good cook and was employed in various houses to come and cook meals for them. She was the most sought after a person when people had parties and events at home, and therefore she earned enough to help her family live comfortably. She always said that the reason she worked so hard was that someday she could provide a future for her children, a future which they never had. As time passed, Raju had to one day travel to Kolkata with his employer, since that is where she belonged. Since he had become so indispensable to his boss, he was forced to make the trip with her.
Anita too, during that time, was residing in the same city, employed as a cook in the same house as that in which Raju would be staying for the next few days. Anita knew the headmistress well but had never heard of her assistant. A couple of hours after he arrived he was asked to get something from the kitchen, and that was when they met. It may not have been a Holly/Bollywood type meet-cute, with the wind blowing and violins in the background, but it did result into something. Now, Raju was a really shy person, and not much of a ladies’ man, but when he saw Anita for the first time, he just knew she was the one.
“I had not even given him a single look that day”, gushed Anita. “I was too busy in my work and I didn’t even notice him. I later came to know that he was asking around about me, and I grew suspicious about his motive. It did not for a minute strike me that this unknown dark man had decided in his head that he wants to marry me! I began noticing the way he looked at me as we worked around the house, and when I got the chance I asked him what his intentions were. And when he told me that he had come to love me and wanted to marry me, I didn’t know how to react.”
“This was completely unexpected. In our kind of lives, we do not have the luxury to fall in love. The only thing that we think about was where our next meal was coming from. And yet, somehow, Raju had decided that he was not going to give up.” After a few days, when it was time for them to leave, Raju promised Anita that he will come back for her. And boy, he did that and how! He first approached his employer and asked her to fix up the marriage for him, but she completely disagreed. She did not want him to marry Anita, as she was very headstrong and might affect things as they were. On the other hand, Anita faced trouble from her parents, due to the fact that they were from a different caste and therefore unsuitable for each other. But both of them were relentless. Raju left his job, where he had worked for the past ten years, and travelled to Anita’s village to convince her parents.
But her father was unrelenting too. He placed a lot of challenges in front of Raju, ordering him to provide this and that for his house. Even though he agreed to do everything, promising that he will take good care of her, her father still did not want his daughter to be going away so far, into a family whose language and customs he did not understand. A lot of melodrama ensued, nothing short of a soap opera, and finally one day both of them eloped and got married. Raju had nowhere else to go, since his family too had discarded him, and did not even have much money, to begin with. So he travelled back to the only person he knew would help him, and that was the headmistress.
Of course, she was rather shocked at the way things had turned out, and both of them got a lot of scolding. She offered to take Raju back only if he got divorced, but he remained adamant. Finally, the headmistress gave in and provided them with a single room in her school and gave Raju the same work as usual. In the beginning, Anita went back to her old work of cooking, but when she had two children, the headmistress offered to educate them at her school for free if she took on the job of head housekeeper at her school. And thus, for their sake, she took on this new job and has been working for twenty years now.
“It has not been easy. Our parents never forgave us. I called mine a few years later, and they allowed me to visit them yearly after my children were born, but they still don’t want to see my husband’s face. Raju has never taken a single holiday in the twenty years we have worked here, saying that he has nowhere to go. For me, it only pleases me to know that my children will get better things in life, things that we never got. They will be educated, can get better jobs. I never expected much from life, and I am satisfied that I at least married someone that I loved, who was such a good person, who cared about me. And when my children are grown up, I will encourage them to marry whomever they want”, she said with tears in her eyes.
And that made me realise, that love is not always all hearts and flowers. It doesn’t need the money and big houses and lots of gifts. It doesn’t need huge proposals or acts of valour and chivalry. All it needs is two hearts that simply decide to be together forever. It can happen anywhere, anytime and to anyone. Even to a common man.
