Daring to Cross Boundaries

I have great regards and appreciation for those who cross boundaries – cultural, religious, national, linguistic and ideological, to name a few. For me these are people who are worthy of our praise, because they have crossed the barriers which often keep us within a particular culture, religion or nation, and it would take quite a bit of courage and guts to cross over to the other side. But in this case, the other side is not always proverbial greener part, but the one which invites to fight continuously against the very group of people one belongs to, and that is not always pleasant, as the story of Mahabharata tells us. To fight against one’s own people is the most painful of all battles.

I had decided to join the wedding dinner of this staff of our social center, not because he is known to me intimately or that his family is well-known to me. The main reason I wanted to go and wish the couple is because the couple are starting their life together with a different note. It is not the normal note that all songs begin. I was not aware of the story of this wedding, until one of my young companions today narrated me over the lunch table, and since then my appreciation for the bridegroom has increased manifold. Has he done anything heroic, worthy of such praise? To my mind he mind have done something praise worthy, but for him it might not.

To decide to marry a girl/woman who is already married and separated, for whatsoever reason it may be, one needs to have a lot of courage and determination. At the age of 32, this young man is already fighting a big battle with poverty and privation; with difficulty his mother had managed to get his elder sister married off, and they had to wait for another two years to collect some more money to organize the wedding of this young man, who but gets a meager salary, and his mother is still paid a lump sum amount for looking after our sick and senior fathers. But it is not easy to manage a family with the salary of the mother and son, and at this juncture is the marriage arranged.

Some years ago, when both the boy and the girl joined our social centre for work, they used to tease each other. It is said that the marriage of the girl, at the age of 18, broke soon after because her husband was found to be impotent, and when they were preparing to get separated, her present husband used to tease her that she had married an impotent. But teasing might have soon become a feeling of empathy for her, and later flowered into love. I believe no one can marry another out of sympathy, not even for a higher cause; that would only defeat the very purpose of marriage. I would take my hats off to both of them that their love could travel so far.

But crossing boundaries? The boy is originally a Tamil, and the girl a Bengali; the boy is Catholic and the girl traditional Hindu; the boy is at home with Hindi, while the girl in Bengali. But I believe that true love can break all boundaries; after all, love knows no language, and that is the reason why event the blind, deaf and dumb can love others and experience the love of others. I know one thing for sure, that the more the boundaries one crosses in life, the better will be the joy and happiness in reserve for him/her. Crossing boundaries also makes one strong to face any future challenge and difficulty. Such people are often courageous persons, who do not easily shy away from facing difficulties. Today at the core of my heart, I would like to bless both of them to cross many more boundaries which may come their way to enter into the world of happiness and joy.

Re-writing Destiny

A popular Tamil proverb says that marriages are determined in heaven, and often we come across cases of marriage which are strange and even hard to believe. And such is the marriage of this young man, with two legs thin as sticks (due to polio), and this beautiful young lady. It is a marriage between weakness and strength, weakness of the young man whose movement is highly restricted due to his legs, and strength of the lady, who gave up her family and all ties in order to stand by him, after a courtship of seven long years. But at the time of marriage, there were very few to bless them, save a Jesuit priest who stood by the couple and gave them all the much needed support, and a few other close friends. But there was something unusual in the marriage.

Maybe unusual is not the right word, a better word might be extra-ordinary. What made the 'black beauty' to stick to the young man, knowing well that her life too would be in a way restricted (imagine the restrictions to her freedom of movement); often in public gatherings it might become a bit embarassing to introduce a crippled as one's husband, however well educated he might be, and however loving he could be. To go out of the social conditionings and limitations, is in a true sense a heroic value. For the young man, this is the best he could get from life, and for the lady, this is the best she could ever offer to someone in life.

We cannot avoid the scorn of the family members and the neighbors, who might smell something out of the marriage, that the girl might be evil-intentioned, or the couple had a hidden agenda in getting married, despite the opposition by both the families! But nothing could stop them from being united in marriage, and the presence of just a handful of men and women to stand by them at the moment of their self-offering to each other was enough for them to put the right foot forward, as another Tamil proverb might have it. They have no regrets, no demands from anyone on earth. They do not mind starting life anew, from the scratch. There is a special joy in exploring life as it unfolds every moment, and every day.

But what could we say about the families of the couple, who initially oppposed the marriage, but later became indifferent. The girl's family could not believe that she would do such a stupid thing to marry a physically challenged person, and they might even thought that it was a shameful thing for her to do that, and they would have thought it better to keep themselves away from what she was doing; they could not accept her determination, it came as a big blow to them. But then what about the boy's family: instead of welcoming the lady to their household, they only keep her away from them, because there was a unseen factor dividing the families : caste, the most poisonous demon causing havoc in most of the families in the South.

There is no greater assurance in such difficult moments than divine providence, and hope in life as it takes charge of the new family that is formed in marriage. Life has the potentiality to transform hearts, and melt stones. It might take sometime for life to reveal magical moments, where reality would be so very different from what people thought it to be. Where hearts reach out to the core of their inner selves, there no caste, no family feuds, economical factors, or even physical beauty can stand. Truly from this day, the young man has better sticks to lean on - his wife, and with her by his side, he can face any stromy night, scorching sun and torrential rain!