Match-22

Today, 22 years ago, I got married. Ironically, while I was making plans for Sunday my wife had forgotten that it was our anniversary.

(Her sister stared at her, open-jawed.) Maybe it was because she was nearly finished with Anna Karenina, from which everyone quotes Leo Tolstoy that every marriage is unhappy in its unique way. Like my wife I also spent six to seven weeks reading Tolstoy, though that was in 2010 and it was War and Peace; perhaps the personalities of a couple really do converge after decades of wedlock.

There’s no way of characterising a marriage because unlike steady-state physics it is always many things at the same time, and each of those things in flux. A marriage contains the best moments of one’s life and also the worst; elation as well as despair. Over time marriage comes to resemble the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, where the two of you have agreed to cease-fire with occasional confidence-building measures comprising of people-to-people contact.

In the recently published The Obamas, Jodi Kantor asks America’s first couple how it was possible for them to have an equal marriage when one partner is President. David Remnick’s review recounts how Michelle Obama immediately let out an “hmmmpfh” and “then let her husband suffer through the answer” (he made three stop-and-start attempts). So marriage is, after all, about the power relationship between two human beings. In my case, it is complicated by the fact of my outsized ego.

Having a massive ego can be justified for the driving force it becomes. Do you really think I could ever have become Editor-in-Chief of my second newspaper if I did not have an ego, even if it often threatened to crowd my wife out of the room that is our marriage? There are journalists who achieve “work-life balance”, whatever that is. I’ve not been one of those.

And on top of journalism, I have attempted to write my own books during the past two decades: there have been a couple of published works of non-fiction; a failed fiction manuscript that garnered close to a hundred rejection slips back in 1993; an incomplete graphic novel about my post-9/11 adventures in Pakistan, stuffed at the bottom of my bottom drawer; an incomplete science fiction novel; and a near-complete literary work. Writing is a solitary activity — quite the opposite of marriage.

It requires the kind of concentration that is the Siamese twin of neglect. To write, and to not give up, requires a giant ego (even for people with fragile egos).

It follows that a person can be so involved in his day job or in his personal projects only if he is passionate about his work. And anyone with passion is also someone who can rage. When a person rages, the easiest available target is always their spouse.

This is admittedly a lot of justification for what could possibly be also seen as bad behavior or just plain selfishness. My wife put up with it for a long time, even soldiering on after our third child was born and I decided to leave journalism to study philosophy.

Her maternity leave over, she returned to work, commuting an hour to an office and an hour back home. It was the same office where we met and fell in love so many years ago. At this point, the burden of young children and earning a living and putting up with a philosophising spouse was so much that her faith in marriage was severely shaken for several years.

Often I think the best thing that happened to our marriage was our leaving Delhi. When we moved to Chennai (where I headed The New Indian Express), my wife left her job and was able to lead a less physically-demanding life that was focused on our children, the eldest one already a teenager. In some ways we discovered new things about each other, and being in the South also coincided with us entering a spiritual phase of life. And four years later we moved to Mumbai (I complete a year at DNA tomorrow), a city that seems agreeable to my wife.

Our eldest is now studying abroad and though we still have two teenagers at home I think we realise that one day the two of us will be alone (or maybe not: my wife sometimes threatens that she will dump me the day our youngest goes off to college). Perhaps the state of things was in evidence on New Year’s Eve, when the five of us were in Abu Dhabi for a concert by Coldplay. My wife and I were overwhelmed by the experience (we love the music); our kids were away from us, up against the barricades to the stage; we were standing a few rows of people behind them in the fan pit, surrounded by people younger than us by some. We clung to each other and listened to the songs in bliss.

And so, on this anniversary, our 22nd, I’ve decided to borrow my wife’s copy of Anna Karenina and read what Mr Tolstoy says about marriage.

The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai