Its inexplicable how sometimes life makes us see the deeper meaning of things in ways we would rather not appreciate. Like a cruel master, life wants us to slog before we get the reward. So we value them much thoroughly.

It was mid November, 2010. I was sitting all alone in a Hospital waiting for my turn to be checked by the Neurologist. Scared to death if the headache I was having for the past 5 days was just a neck sprain or something worse. I had obviously not talked about the headache to anyone at home. I wanted to know what it was first before telling my mom, or anyone else. This meant I had to go to the hospital alone. Not a very pleasant idea for a doctor-fearing soul like me.

Not helping the headache was the constant push from my family for marriage. I had just turned 26 three months back. Why should I get married? What happens to all my plans? My guitar lessons, my gym – which may have given me the neck sprain, my second MBA! Everything goes out of the window if I get married. I really failed to see why in the world do people marry? When would my mom stop doing that to me? Exactly why is she in such a hurry?

While my mind wandered from one reason to another for why a bachelor guy with his minds in the right place stay bachelor for as long as he can, I saw an octogenarian couple sitting across from me in the hospital lobby. They both looked quite well off, educated, decent couple. The man was a calm, pleasant looking oldie but he might have been slightly worried. I can’t blame him; he was sitting in a hospital after all. Even I must’ve looked a little worried, because we exchanged the I-know-you’re-also-shit-scared-of-docs-just-like-me look several times in that long waiting period. His wife was sitting next to him wearing a saree. She was frail, slightly slouched and looked at least a thousand times more worried than her husband. She bore the look that you’d rather avoid seeing while you’re in the hospital, as if the doctor was going to prescribe her the bitterest of pills. One could easily say that she hated going to doctor’s much more than me or her husband. In face she almost wore a mawkish look on her face – as if she will burst out crying any moment.

She must be scared that the doctor was going to give her an injection – was my explanation for her worried face. Her husband was trying very hard to cheer her up. Every once in a while he would utter some sweet nothings into her ear and she would give a very obviously half-hearted smile that said “you won’t find it funny if you were in my place!! I am in so much trouble right now, you can’t even imagine” In fact at one point it seemed as if she was scolding the poor man for his constant jokes - so much for his efforts to cheer her up! I felt so bad for the old man. I imagined him remembering his good old bachelor days… And that, so to say, reinforced my belief that marriages are a bad idea – at any stage of the institution.

At that point uncle might have given me a look – noticing that I just saw him getting upbraided by his wife in the hospital lobby. Men don’t like that – getting upbraided in public, I can tell you that. So I decided I would look elsewhere for the rest of the waiting period. There were plenty of options in the pretty Junior Doctors that were doing the rounds… suited me just fine.

The hour went by and their name was called. The old man remained calmly fixed in his place, while his wife made an effort to get up. And that drew my attention back to where they were sitting. She took a while in adjusting her purse to her shoulder and then started walking around her husband to go behind the wheelchair on which he was seated. It took her some effort to push the wheelchair ahead, which was when I saw that her husband had a painful plaster in his leg. And the appointment was with an orthopedic who was going to remove that plaster today.
Paradigms shifted. I still found the husband to be a very sweet and pleasant old man. He was smiling at me as he was being taken to the doctor – as if he knew what I’d been thinking all this while. And I smiled back.

The image of his lady took a sharp turn though. She was a physically weak lady with a formidable will power to have brought her husband for as big a procedure as this all alone at that age. She had a hard time sitting there waiting for the worst to get over. She might have been praying all this while and her husband was disturbing her, because I saw a lace of beads in her hand. There was so much love in her eyes, so much care and so much of affection for her husband that she did a poor job in fighting her worried face there. She must not have been a great company at the hospital waiting room. But she was certainly a great better half. The wrinkles on her face as she smiled talked volumes of the loving story of a life spent more better than worse.

Marriages, I reckon, are truly made in heaven. And if there’s one for me, we’ll see... ;)