It took me a while to come to this frame of mind. But those seven years of separation, on and off, on and off, each time you resolve something in your own mind.
It is a factor, this fear of death, when you are dating, falling in love; I think all lovers probably go through this. Everybody is afraid of losing the other one -– to death, to something or someone else. That is a human phenomenon. Of course, yeah, we also talked about it, Vasant talked to me about it, he said if something happens to me you should be strong, you should move on. And of course I told him then, as a woman in love will tell her man, that I will die if something happened to him, that I could not live without him. But look at me -- I am talking, walking, laughing, going out and doing things.
In August, less than a month after he was gone, I began rehearsing for my play. In September, I performed that play, playing the lead role, in New Delhi. And two days ago, I performed publicly, for the first time.
Separation, for large amounts of time, I had gotten used to, to the point where it no longer upset me. So -- I suppose this is the kind of defence the mind builds for itself -- there are times when you think, tell yourself, you are just apart. But then every now and again, the realisation comes that this time it is permanent, that you will never see him, hold him, again, and that is very hard, and I don't think time will ever make that easier to take. Maybe the best I can hope for is for that feeling to come with decreasing frequency? I don't know -- right now, I am living each day as it comes.
In fact, that is one of the things I wanted to highlight in this play I am doing -- that every army woman is in a sense a widow, for greater or lesser periods of time. It is either because he is away on the front, or because he is gone, one more soldier who fell doing his duty, but either way, we women largely live our lives as widows -- the person we love is in our hearts all the time, but rarely in our arms, and that is the hardest thing of being an army wife.
People don't even think about it, they think being an army wife is about travelling, having access to the army canteen where things are cheap -- you have to walk in our shoes to understand what we go through, every day of our lives, to understand that this loneliness is something we have to learn to live with, as a constant in our lives.
Image: A scene from the play Colonel Venugopal and his wife wrote. Photograph courtesy: Subhashini Vasant, who played a role in the drama, is seen at right
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