January 16, 2024

It was a quiet dinner with P at the Nonya restaurant at the Taj Hotel at Jumeirah Lakes Towers to mark off year 24 of our marriage. The next one is the major milestone- and P has grand plans for a grand celebration. Meanwhile, I was in a reflective mood. Growing up I was particularly close to two cousins, well- one cousin and one technically a niece. The cousin (brother) was three years my senior, while the niece was about a year senior.  In all collective family gatherings, of which there were so many when I was growing up, the three of us would hang out together, exchanging notes, experiences and everything in between. There were occasionally fights within us, but they were ephemeral. All in all, it is a formidable childhood memory that I cannot easily discard. We even got married within a year of each other. My cousin married in 1999, my niece in 2000 and me in 2001. At the turn of the millenium, while everyone was bogged down with the red herring called "Y2K", each of us chose partners to traverse our future life path. As is stands, my cousin is still married and yet his relationship with his wife is fraught with serious problems- and is also very publicly known to the extended family at large. There were multiple considerations for a separation, but the financial settlement on the account of divorce is skewed heavily in the favour of the female partner. I suspect my cousin did his sums and decided to suck it up. They have been together throughout, and when I met him briefly on my visit to London last October, I did not pick up any signs of any underlying trauma from our conversations over multiple dinners. Maybe things are improving, or maybe there is a tacit agreement of disagreement without being disagreeable. 

My niece, on the other hand, dropped a bombshell to the family recently when she announced that she had filed for divorce from her partner. The live in the New York area and also being US citizens are guided by US law, which makes it a very worthy proposition to do this for the woman. This is also why rich men sign pre-nuptial agreements when they marry trophy wives- or any kind of wives. In this case, it has to be said, when they got married, the husband was still a graduate student. Over many years of sacrifice and service, not to mention the fortune of landing a job in the investment banking industry on Wall Street, he had made himself a rather wealthy man by any standard. So, the separation was tantamount to winning the lottery for my niece. But that is only half the story. She had been plagued and suffering for a long time in the marriage because her husband was devoted to his work and his friends and just about anyone except his wife. He also held a tight leash on his finances, purportedly not throwing enough cash on his wife as he should have, were he a good husband. One can hold this against him, I guess. However, it is not like he was seeing another woman- he was married to his job on the one hand. On the other, he was very possibly a skinflint. And there could well be some deep psychological reason for being so. Either way, what I could gather from parleying with my niece was that he never physically abused her, nor had he been unfaithful. And yet here he was- about to part with half his wealth. He was trying hard to persuade my niece but to no avail. My niece told me that he was not taking it well physically and had lost a lot of weight. Hardly surprising when you snatch half the proceeds of a manically parsimonious multi-millionaire. I am trying not to judge my niece for her actions. I am not in her shoes so can never really understand what she is going through. But based on what I heard, it is hard not to feel for the other party.

By comparison, my marriage is still going well. We have bitter quarrels, typically once or twice a year, and it leaves a trail of destruction in one or more places but so far, they have been innocuous places. We have made up and moved on. I can only imagine what it would be like to have marital problems- for me even a small quarrel unhinges me. So, in my case, I place a high premium for peace. All things considered; I have reasons to be grateful for how this has gone down in my case. There was a lot of turbulence initially, as I guess is expected, especially since my partner is a strong personality and is not likely to bend without massive resistance. I have on the contrary, often been accused either directly or implicitly by many of being too compliant. And maybe there is some truth to that. If the compliance does not eat my soul, I don't see the problem with complying. Fortunately, my self-esteem - masculine or otherwise- is not linked to how disagreeable I can be. This has brought me peace, which, as I have mentioned before, I value highly. But there is a price to pay for this ofcourse. It leads to more sedate career progression. The more you comply the less you are able to get what you want. The fact is, I want less- so it all works out.  So, I tell myself each day. But do I really want less. I want less of what many people conventionally want. But one of my introspections has revealed to me that I am somewhat gifted musically- although I never trained myself formally. Before I pass on, I would like to test how far I can go with music. I have no target, because I believe- as articulated by none other than the mighty “Sting”,  music is truly its own reward if pursued with complete honesty. But I do want to perform, compose, produce- and generally occupy myself significantly in this space. It helps that I do not currently need to make a living from it, but some desperation would have helped. I believe both extremely great and extremely evil things are only achieved by desperate people.