I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman I met a few days back in a cafe.
I prefer drinking coffee at peace. Since there was no place left, she sat next to me. She was wearing a chudithar, bob styled hair, salt and pepper look. Maybe in her later 40s? Assumed it to be. Trust me, I am very bad at this. We smiled and went back to our coffee. She ordered salt biscuits (quite famous in that cafe), the waiter gave it to me instead. That’s how the conversation began.
We started with shop’s signature snacks, then to our favourite snacks and then to how we were commuting back. She had come on her two wheeler and said she wanted to learn to drive a car. One more thread to continue the convo. We were discussing about various driving classes in our places and the prices.
Then slowly, it turned personal.
She said she was married to a man twenty years older, with two children. She has to return home to take care of the second one. I went blank and stayed silent. It was forced marriage by her mother and she had learned to accept. Her face carried a lot that she wasn’t saying. Her mother was convinced because the man was settled with a stable income. Nothing else mattered to them.
She said she was content with the kids now.
I was married at the young age, not knowing anything. Even now I don’t know much. Everything is taken care of by him. Slowly, I am learning to do things on my own. Like this coffee she said.
I asked her age, she said thirty four. Before I could say anything, her phone rang and she left. Too much of salt in a biscuit.
I ordered another coffee and sat there.
A film released this month asks whether a man in his forties and a woman of twenty-two should be together. It has been mostly welcomed. I haven’t seen it yet. I don’t need to, to know that the same twenty years, pointed the other way, would have been even be considered as the plot of a thriller. No directors or producers would risk their money on this.
We use age as a stand-in for power, I think. Then we only object when the power is flowing the wrong way up and we use age as an excuse.
So whom to blame here? The mother who thought she was protecting her daughter? The daughter who never learned to say no? Or the structure itself ?
Some are given a choice and some are forced. Choice, it turns out, is a privilege.
Cheers
PS: I forget to ask her name!
Check out the previous post: What Keeps You Going?
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