Love in the time of lawsuits

Come on now, men and women have been playing footsie down the ages; it is nothing new. In most love stories, when boy meets girl, either or both are married to other people. Let’s admit it, there is something love-murderous about marriages.

Of course, the wearing of the ring begets a more saintly love that is only a ghost of its former self — with school admissions for the brats, family vacations, and joint invites to weddings/funerals establishing a couple’s credentials more than their undying love for each other. Not tonight, darling, says one darling and the other darling heaves a sigh of relief.

Laws of attraction are strict; love strikes like lightning, with totally unsuitable subjects and in the most illogical of settings. For that delicious give and take of this most fickle of human emotions, a sense of freedom is mandatory. There should be a whiff of ‘your place or mine?’ in the air, two different addresses that the parties can go to anytime they choose. Love, erotic or neurotic, intoxicates most when it is unsuitable. You’ve already married the suitable boy, remember? Hanky-panky in the car park or crawling into the old double bed — no contest there.

There are office-husbands and office-wives, a position that may or may not involve foreplay but ensures deep bonding with a member of the opposite sex at any given workplace. Single-minded focus on grandma’s wisdom — men are always after one thing — can blind us to the fact that women too gain from keeping male colleagues/seniors in a state of mild arousal. She is never asked to deliver (the men are all probably impotent anyway, only asking that their egos be stroked) and can be absent from work whenever she wants — hooray!

For every man who leches, there is a woman ready to simper. And for every woman who simpers, there is a man ready to give up the principles of a lifetime just to lech.

Human dynamics don’t take office ethics seriously. What David Davidar and Lisa Rundle felt for each other only David Davidar and Lisa Rundle know. Presumably their eyes met across a crowded room and either both were insanely smitten or one wooed the other or — and this is a distinct possibility — one fell and the other did not. That Rundle rocked Davidar is obvious from his emails to her, where she is a “vision in pink” and “utterly gorgeous”. If she billed and cooed right back, Davidar may have — like most married men — deleted the e-endearments.

What is however notable is that both got a lot of work done at Penguin; it wasn’t all play. Everything was fine till Frankfurt, where the ‘he said, she said’ begins. She says he forced his tongue into her mouth and he says they kissed twice by mutual consent, which means his tongue was invited in, entertained and reluctantly sent back to his own mouth. Who french-kissed whom, only their tongues can say.

Since sexual-predator seniors and subordinates who roll over and play sexual victims survive off each other, no one can comment on what goes on in offices around the globe with any authority. What is clear is that more and more non-marital relationships are seeking validation. When couples can’t walk hand in hand into the sunset at even the hunky-dory stage, where do they go when things turn sour? How does the dumped seek compensation?

Spouses hog all the ears, social-familial-legal, when marriages go belly up. When trysts go awry, the other man/other woman can only stew in silence or sue, dragging sordid details as proof. For sweet nothings whispered in ‘the heat of the moment’ are secondary to wedding vows, the breaking of an entire human heart second to a technically maintained fidelity — the triumph of structure over self. Davidar publicly apologises to wife, but kisses and tells twice on non-wife! No wonder the latter wants all his loose change.

Maybe Davidar ran when he should have looked Rundle in the eye and told her why yeh shaadi nahi ho sakti. The cruel part is that both now run the risk of being caricatured by a world suddenly gone moral. Is this a case of revenge — hell hath no fury etc, is it unrequited love, someone crying wolf or really an almost-rape?

Legal departments are trying to decide even as we speak.
Eyes can meet across a crowded room by all means, but the owners of the eyes should kindly note the time this happens. Your lawyer may want to know.
The writer is an author and journalist.