Love, life and other impediments - Part-2

Please click here to read part-1

I could not fathom why a police officer would call me on my mobile phone. If it was any official matter, my legal advisor would inform me of the forthcomings. Why would the police have to chase me; that too with an arrest warrant? I sensed something was fishy. But I could not understand what it was.

“Officer, My name is Samarth Irrinjalakuda, I am the…..” Oh Forget it. “I don’t understand all this. What have I done to get arrested?”

An accompanying constable spoke “Saar, you don’t see TV ah? Your girlfriend is there no. She has made all your personal life public saar. Better means you only…”

“Hmmmm…” The police officer gave the constable a blatant look. The constable, with an implicit gaze, stopped talking.

“Officer, can you please tell me what is happening?”

“Mr. Samarth, your girlfriend has taken your extra marital affair to media; the taped call recordings and dirty talk, pillow talk or whatever you call it; your sexist conversations, everything is being aired on Times Today news channel since noon. She has also produced before the media, recordings of your anti-feminist views on sex, your cynical views on women centric society, etc.

WHAT?

Are you really surprised, Mr Samarth? With my experience in cybercrime and CID, I could confidently say that those recordings were not forged. It was not you. Really?

Silence

Mr. Samarth?

Silence

Constable spoke again in a varied tone “Hehehehe.. Saar… in his silence wonly answer is there no saar”

I was totally flabbergasted and couldn’t utter a word. After a long pause, the police officer spoke again.

“Mr. Samarth, there is lot of furor out there. The women welfare associations have gathered demanding your arrest. It is quite a commotion in front of the police station. Since evening, all major national media is reporting your story. Social Media is abuzz with posts against you. The hashtag #HangSamarth is still trending on twitter. There is widespread protest in the national capital too. We have orders from the CMO to nab you. Women and child development minister Monica Gandhi has ordered an inquiry”.

His words terrified me. With a fretting temperament, I opened twitter app on my mobile phone. He was true. I had 6730 notifications and my handle had 4500+ mentions. I did not dare click on the hashtag. Fear crept inside me like the ghost patterns did to a horror movie watcher. For a moment, I thought of the consequences and I was hounded by the fear. I had no idea what to say.

Police officer continued. “As your well-wisher, I can give you a serious advice. Avoid media confrontations completely as much as possible. Talk to your legal advisor immediately and try for an out of court settlement with your girlfriend. If you go to court, media will create sensational news out of nothing, your family will be dragged into this unnecessarily, your wife will come into scene and then it leads to alimony and what not. These will rip you apart Mr. Samarth. I hope you know what happened to film star Rithvick Rohan in Konkona Rounit’s case”.

Oblivious to Tania taking it to television and the chaos that ensued, I tried to connect the dots. But everything seemed like against the odds. I could think of just two things. Was there someone else who was playing the cards from behind? I had no idea. Were Tania and my wife both involved in this? That seemed very unlikely. Probably Anita could be as clueless as I am right now. Suddenly something inside my mind was wide awake. It didn’t take a genius inside me to guess that. Now it was all in place. Oh dear lord! I just couldn’t fathom what mess I was into.

A.N.I.T.A. is T.A.N.I.A.

I recalled all the conversations with Tania. Salman Rushdie, euthanasia, medieval economy, matriarchy – all were topics of my interest! It was a perfectly planned decoy! Anita had executed the plan so flawlessly that I was just wheedling the response tailored to her trap. And I couldn’t realize a wee bit. A chill ran down my spine. As the halogens of the Police patrol shot two separate beams into the road’s slowly settling dust, I was confounded with what had just happened in my life.

When I first met Anita at MIT sailing pavilion, we both were students. I was at the Sloan School of management and she was pursuing her masters at MIT School of engineering. She was an impeccably beautiful girl with a brilliant academic record. After her bachelors from NIT Kurukshetra, she was pursuing her Masters in Structural Engineering, a domain which itself had inclined towards male dominion. She was the perfect concoction of beauty and brains I had ever seen so far, in a girl. I had fallen in love with her instantaneously at our very first meet. After my convocation, I had proposed her and she had accepted it. As soon as we both came to India, we spoke to our parents and they overwhelmingly accepted our love.

Just like me, even she wanted to rise and shine in her domain. Back in India, her project on constructing energy efficient buildings was critically acclaimed. Her design had won ASEAN center of energy green building award for 2016. A white paper “Structures with seismic viscoelastic dampers and energy dissipation devices” published by her had given her international recognition. Many state governments invited her to be the designer of their new construction projects. Her rising fame was recognized by the United Nations and she got a call by the UN Secretary General to serve on the United Nations’ High Level Advisory Group on Sustainable structures (HLAG-SS). For this, she had to be in Belgrade, Serbia for a period of three years.

Anita’s rising career aspiration was countered by my ego and my parents’ social norms. My parents wanted a bahu just to keep the family bloodline from extinction. Nothing more. But Anita always argued that India had the most overeducated wives in India and that if something that had to be changed, it was my parents’ attitude. My parents always saw her as a girl from middle-class family who did not understand the north Indian family dynamics. To be frank, I too was intimidated about her success. I could not get accustomed to the fact that she was professionally more successful than me. This always enraged Anita. She wanted to go to Serbia. But my father believed that daughter-in-law staying away from home for three years was a sort of premonition. And my mother always blamed her for breach of harmony at home.

The existence of this patriarchy in my family was something I had hidden from her even after marriage and this enraged her. She often felt cheated. Owing to patriarchal stress, even though I wanted to help her, I did not. Succumbing to family pressure, I could not keep even a single of the armada of promises I had made her. Whenever this came up to be discussed, I was totally taking my parents’ side and worse, I was always going against her. I tried to convince her; but she refused and was hell bent on going to Serbia.

My father and I discussed a wicked idea of forcefully putting my child in her womb, so that she is left with no options but to stay back. What followed it was obvious. A few months later, she told me that she was gestating. I was so meddled with the plan’s success, that I did not even make an attempt to congratulate her or even feel great about the news. Now, for all three of us, she was just a medium of fulfillment. More than the happy news, we celebrated that we overthrew her; we partied that her professional career was coming to an end. We rejoiced at her helplessness.

By the time the baby was born, her professional career was totally doomed. She came back to my home, only to be ill-treated by me and my parents. Doctors termed it as postnatal depression and told her it was very common after delivery. The more she resisted, the more she was tormented by us. She couldn’t manage without popping 2 anti-depressant pills a day. I made sure that media did an extensive coverage of what had happened to the most famous structural engineer this country had ever seen. Although, no one got close to the reality, every media house ran its own version of her doomed career. Anita’s condition had disrupted her family’s reputation too. Her sabotaged career aspirations were quoted as examples in the TED talks on Women’s career. For outside world, she suffered from postnatal depression of level 3 severity. But in actual, it was something else; something very different and something more intense.

As the jeep entered police station with the siren ON, hundreds of activists pounced on the jeep, screaming and raising slogans against me. One woman I caught my eyes with, took a rotten tomato and threw at my face. From being a lover, being heartbroken to being a felon, I was in a varied mood within last 8 hours. As the police officer escorted me inside, I was falling deep down, preparing myself for the long wait. I wiped off the rotten tomatoes along with the anticipation from my face. I knew my life had slipped very deep to insurmountable levels of despair. I knew my life will never be the same again!

I was charged for sedition, hatred speech and acts intended to outrage the feelings of women. The case was running in court. The same media houses which I had asked to cover Anita’s story, covered my case with specifics of every hearing in detail. One day, out of the blues, Tania had absconded and the hence case was dropped. But the damage had already been done. I could not think of undoing it even in my wildest dreams. The same media which had assisted me to put an end to Anita’s career had branded me the ‘Bad man of the Corporate World’.

Outside the court, the police escorted me to the jeep. I had clear instructions by the police to avoid media. I saw Anita at the far end of the court’s corridor handing over something to another person. As the jeep turned right and approached the corridor, I caught a glimpse of the other person. My eyes instantly recognized her. She was the same woman at the police station, who threw rotten tomatoes at me! As the jeep increased its turbulence and vanished into the traffic, I saw the woman doing a Namaste, with Anita clasping a 2000 Rs note in between her palms. Standing next to the woman, smirking, was my car driver.

Epilogue:

True realization of self in a man’s life arises when he encounters something in his life that staggers him into the need for self-examination and self-explanation. In the conference hall, I was sitting alone, at the far end of the corner, in the last row, which was away from the entrance. On the podium, one of the board of director was reading from the script:

“On behalf of the board of directors of Accel Ventures Inc., I take immense pleasure in announcing that Mrs. Anita Irrinjalakuda, will take over the responsibility of Chairman and Managing director of Accel ventures. The members, the statutory auditors and the shareholders of this fifteen million dollar enterprise have unanimously……”

As she entered the stage with her daughter, she threw an askew glance at me with a malicious grin. She had given me a taste of my own medicine, with a dose I would remember for the rest of my life.