Darkness after light

Money matters whether you matter or not. Its manipulative powers matter the most, particularly when it is not your sweat-stained money. The commiserations like 'happiness hijacked by such money is short-lived' we hear very often. Such a windfall, however, causes the loss of self-respect and freedom as collateral damage.

They were on the verge of divorce. The husband constantly contemplated suicide because the loss of self-respect — in a matrimonial relationship, measured by respect in the spouse's eyes — was shameful enough for the husband.

How was the husband's self-respect bruised? Being a government employee, life for him was just pay cheque to pay cheque. This summer, the power load-shedding got worse, and unscheduled outages turned it even worse. The neighbours started having alternative sources of electricity like solar power. Only their house was haunted by darkness at night. The wife too felt deprived whenever the neighbouring women gathered around the vegetable cart and boasted of their luxuries.

The wife's father, being a widower, used to visit them during summer vacation and overstay with them. His own family had been facing financial pressure right from the beginning because the father wasn't a family man. Consequently, his two daughters started teaching at a private school. The financial crunch took its toll on the family so much that the mother, who was also supporting them through stitching, died after enduring the health problems silently.

The father got a twilight fortune of four million rupees from the sale of a property inherited from his deceased childless sister. He ventured on fulfilling all of his "unmet wishes" with the windfall. As the conditions at the daughter's house were not liveable for the father this summer, he offered money for the installation of solar panels. Both the daughter and her husband had to accept the money willy-nilly. But as the saying goes, there is no free lunch, the offer turned into a bargain, and the cost was depletion of marital symbiosis.

The next summer, when the father visited them, he was altogether a different man — overbearing, irascible and taunting. But they had to dance attendance upon him. He wanted three ten-course dinners daily, which was difficult for the family to manage. He would occupy their bedroom, the only room furnished with a one-ton air conditioner, which they used only during the day on solar power, but for the father, they had to keep it on even at night. Their privacy was breached.

The couple started having spousal arguments on a daily basis. The wife insinuated to the husband that he would have to yield to her and her father. The husband almost daydreamed that one day he would get so much money to pay back to his father-in-law to reclaim his status of a patriarch.

Love's binding power was yielding. "But here was a way to evaluate existence. Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved," writes Sophie Elmhirst in A Marriage at Sea. On her side, the wife was torn between her filial and familial duties, though she acrimoniously blamed her father for the disease and death of her mother.

Occupied with depression, the husband resorted to his go-to source of inspiration. Hearing his tragic story, the guru exhorted him in an ascetic tone that life has cast its snares everywhere to trap the trespassers. One who hankers after worldly pursuits is bound to face trials and tribulations. He reminds him of Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace, wherein Mithilda has to pay a heavy price of her youth and beauty just for simple delights, which she claimed as her right.

The husband, however, begged to differ with the teacher's asceticism. To him, social injustice perpetrated by poor governance and oligarchy sucks up all the joys from a poor man's life, rather deprives him of the right to live on this earth — the very right bestowed by the Creator. The husband asserts that he is not the trespasser.

After all, what has he trespassed by having the electricity round the clock for his children, that too in the hot and humid conditions of a scorching summer, which is becoming more severe as the exponents of global warming claim? And who is contributing to global warming, the rich or the poor?