Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I picked up a copy, especially after all the hullabaloo in India when the movie was prevented from releasing, by the censor-board due to its intense sensual flavor. However, beginning to leaf through the pages, was my worst nightmare in literary work ever, so far. Worse than Chetan Bhagat's made-for-movies, hundred-something-rupee, proxy-drama-ridden, unintelligible paperbacks. There is a thrill in reading a piece of work that's subtle, witty and has twisted layers not only in the plot, but also in the choice of words. E.L. James' book is just the opposite! Whenever the female protagonist silently admires the male one, there is a blatant and cyclical"Oh my!" I cannot keep a count on which one I wanted to stick a dagger through my head, and perish! To be fair, and not to give out any spoilers to people who would still like to read this book, my only request is if you feel compelled to buy a copy due to peer-buzz, and yet you decide not to buy the book, consider yourself on a higher intellectual plane than them who are reading the book and even talking about it! Of course, to my Mills & Boons readers, I recommend this M&B digest totally.

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With love, from your Maleficent!

My dear little girl. When I imagine your world, I imagine a little fairy in a pink tent, spangled with stars and glitters. I imagine you wielding a sparkling wand and turning everything sunny with your smile. 

I imagine daddy’s little girl doing her doll’s hair, leaning against his leg as he works on his computer. I see you on your daddy’s lap at the steering wheel, delighted that he’s letting you drive. I see a little face with a mischievous smile – fussing over food, negotiating for that ice-cream. I see you picking up puzzles, and paint books, and color pencils from the kids’ corner, with the certainty and a righteous entitlement that daddy won’t mind spoiling you today. I see butterflies on your dress and daisies in your hair. I see little hands reaching out for daddy’s arms in the middle of the night for security and comfort.

My dear little stepdaughter. I am the reluctant witch, the circumstantial stepmom whom you, at some point in your life, will have imagined stealing your father away. Whom you would perhaps know as the woman who crashed your little world. But I wish I could tell you someday how much I had wished your daddy could be with you. And how much it tore your daddy apart to leave his innocent little tinker-bell behind at her mom’s new residence. He could no longer bear to live with your mother. Why? I wish I could tell. These reasons perhaps you will never know about your parents, reasons that adults mostly sweep away under the bed, in closets, diaries or courtrooms; reasons why two married people sometimes painfully conclude their marriage. They wish they could turn back time, mend things and compromise, but they realize that is not to be.

You will perhaps not understand this now. You don’t even understand now when you see your daddy pulling out of the driveway, tearing himself away from your innocent face urging him to stay – that he will never come back to your mother’s house to live. Somewhere your little heart wishes that your fairy godmother will hear your nightly prayers and bring your parents together. And a few years from now you will learn better prayers. 

But, dear child, your parents are both very good people. They would not normally hurt anyone. Just know that something went wrong, something that they could not manage – something that broke their hearts beyond repair. They went through their share of life-changing and life-upsetting experiences, their moments of whirlpools and doldrums. They tried very hard to stay – to compromise for your sake. Don’t let anyone make you believe otherwise. I saw your father weeping for you. I know how his heart was bleeding – because I have been my daddy’s little girl too, and still am. Both your parents tried very hard to forgive themselves for doing this to you, and to their marriage. There’s repentance. There are tears. There’s loathing for the hurts. There’s respect. But there’s no turning back.

But my dear, dear little girl. I promise your daddy will be there for all your birthdays and convocations, graduation. The world is not a bad place. Your daddy will be there for you without even you knowing it – making sure that you receive the best of everything. Your daddy is a good man – he lights up my world – as will the right man light up yours someday. You will come across all kinds of men, the ones who will like you and then hurt you, the ones who you must learn to dump quickly. Learn not to relate these to your parents’ divorce in anyway. It’s a real world, made of real people. We are complex now – we will de-tangle and be better connected someday. Here’s a forty-year-old woman who has had her heart broken by the wrong man! I am speaking to you from the other side of a hardened life, smitten with experiences. Your father and I were friends for a long time – we respected each other. And then when your father moved out from your mom’s life, we fell in love. We were so fiercely similar, madly in love, it was inevitable.

I pray that your mommy, daddy and I are able to act as adults, and parent you well and protect you from believing that relationships don’t last, that men are bad or divorce is unfair. Your father is an exceptional person. So is your mother. They were just not meant to be together, at this point in life. But neither regret having you. Because they both know you will someday fledge into the beautiful woman they imagined you to be the day you were born. 

And perhaps you will understand and forgive me someday. Even if not, I will always watch you over from behind the shadows.

Who used the D-word!

From the sleeves of a proverbial society will quietly slip out a cheat-code for your happiness, a delirious, half-minded, unintelligible admonition “at least think of the child and compromise!”

You are one of those two people in a marriage who cannot stand the sight of the other in the same room when you wake up in the morning. You make all the excuses not to return home in time for your anniversary dinner, because you feel stifled at the thought of sharing a bite of that piece of the cake with your estranged spouse. Perhaps, he has cheated on you. Maybe it was all toxic and abusive. Or quite simply you have grown out of love. Worse still, as per society’s moral standards, you have fallen for someone else who lights up your world! And then one day you choose to walk out of that door, to break free.

The friendly neighborhood that woke up to your happy family pictures on your social media wall on Sunday, suddenly feels the need to grimly sit on your living room couch on a Wednesday evening, sipping a cup of tea, and knocking some good sense into your head to make you hold it all together. After they leave, you toss and turn in your sleepless pyjamas, semi-convinced and half-guilty for being so harsh on the child whom you had decided to bring to this world, and now ruthlessly abandon. You are made to second-guess about your own life and decisions of turning turtle on your marriage.

Against all the good intention with which your family and friends chide you on to reconsider, I will do just the opposite. I will vehemently question if the society is in good hands if it passes the please-compromise verdict to people who are not meant to be together. You may swallow the frog and live with your spouse for the sake of those children that you “made” with him or her. My purpose is to not undermine the institution of marriage or devalue adjustments, nor encourage you to walk out at the batting of an eyelid. Relationships need work, sometimes even a wager or an incentive. And I will not deny them that.

However, my purpose is to stand against the age-old dogma that divorce is bad, that wanting out of a stalemate relationship is blasphemy. Quite on the contrary, I am more than happy to stand with a friend who for the love of himself for once took a stand about his life. Even as you may be the adulterous spouse, and walked out, I will still respect you more. At least at some point instead of spending the rest of your days cheating on your spouse, you had the courage to walk away from a relationship you no longer value. You cannot be forced to work out a marriage that you don’t believe in. I will respect you more than the person who roves out to have a relationship, and then comes home comfortably to an unsuspecting spouse.

The hype about being married, runs in the veins of the Indian society especially. You were twenty-three and had completed your masters. If you were a girl, they would have started seeking out someone for you already. If you are a guy, they will have given you another three or four years to have settled in your dream job, here in India or abroad; or at least take charge of your family business. Then there would have been a surfing spree through a line pf terribly photoshopped pictures, alongside abruptly-stereotypical self-essays. You would have rummaged through these every evening, and have had exhausting why-not-this-one discussion with your family at the dinner table. And just when the spouse-hunt had begun to get mundane or overwhelming, and you will have almost become certain that you will never find the “right one”, there will be that one perfectly approximate girl or guy you feel you can settle for. This man or woman would come with a seventy-percent perfect-spouse-recipe in your shopping cart, as you mentally tick off a vague checklist. The remaining thirty percent would have been waxed eloquent complimentary by society’s false reinforcement of how good you look together, how well she gels with your family or how successful he is. For this marriage to happen you would give poor, blind Cupid a pair of eyes and make him shoot in your direction. “Ever after” promises are made in haste, without anybody explaining the implication of those vows taken on that cold, loud wedding night. You did enough for the society already.

Next, the society got into your bedroom to see when you can start a family. I am not generalizing here – but how often have we not heard Indian couples saying that their parents and in-laws now want to see grand-kids. A not-so-subtle way of saying – “what’s up with the free sex, dude? There are no free lunches. Make us some babies and fast now!” At that point perhaps, you had barely spent a couple of years figuring out and settling in with your spouse and the families. But the society has a deadline to that.  Rumor has it, it is approximately two years. And by the way, you are not exempt from this if you are one of those few who married for love. Out come the babies, like the promise of pizza houses delivered in thirty minutes or free. And we have happy faces.

Then you turn thirty or thirty-five. You realize how much you had put away to ensure coming back to your mundane life every evening after work. Your guitar hangs tilted perhaps on a designer wall as a creative enhancement to a lovely living room. Or that camera now being used for taking family pictures. A super-bike sold off for a comfortable sedan. A trekking itinerary traded for a trip to Paris whose pictures will look good on your Facebook page! And you sigh!

And then one day what if you do not want all this. You start reacting oddly to your spouse. You get told off for every silly thing. Your thoughts deluge into wanting to break free. Your feisty spouse fights back fiercely charging you with not being committed enough, or showing you how unhappy they are with you and yet they are compromising every day. Your family shudders when they hear of it. "Why don't you have another child!" In the face of such social adjuration, you fall silent and continue with the rut. But then not for long – one year, two years maybe. Then one day you do say the worst. You utter divorce.

You stir a hornet’s nest for yourself. Family and friends spin into action to tell you how wrong you are, and how sacred marriage is. Some communities are more closed than the others and are quick to attach a stigma to the word divorce. But my question to the society is – when you ask two people to compromise – is it the child that you are thinking about? Or is it the discomfort of seeing something unusual unfold in front of you between two people. Two people who are braver than you are, while you slog every day to make it work. Because you will have an identity-crisis if your marriage falls apart.

My experience from the children of my friends, who have been in bad marriages, is that children understand more than we would like to give them credit for. Children have imaginative minds. They love hearing stories because they visualize these stories boundlessly and endlessly - reading between your storytelling, picking up the details and completing the picture in their tiny, little heads. Need I mention then that they will easily pick up those telltale gestures of lack of fondness between their parents? Let us be clear. A child needs parents who love each other, respect each other and are there as active members in the family. In case you don't love each other, and are hanging in there together in the same address for the sake of the child, it is not as flattering for the child as you would like to think. Rather beware of your delusional compromise. It is breaking your child away. It is striking a blow to his values and belief system at a very early age. 

The little one would rather grow up with an independent mother who chose to walk out on the dying relationship, and had the courage to take on the world on her own. On the other end of the pole, a child somewhere will be broken for good imagining relationships to be impermanent or threadbare because she grew up with parents who constantly dished her out friction and the circus of an entangled, toxic and abrasive relationship – of suspicion, judgement and decadence. 

Spare a thought!