From letters to life lessons: A journey of love through time

“Do you love me?”

Like water dripping from a million-year-old stalactite in a languid frequency, her words donged against my tympanic membrane with a cavernous echo. I was in a trance gifted by an antidepressant taken after a late dinner when I was shaken up by the question, “Do you love me?” I continued to lay in bed weighed down by the enormity and ungodly timing of the query. And the clarity it needed.

I initially thought the question was whisked up by some nightmare she had just experienced. But that wasn’t the case as I could see her tearing eyes in the streetlight peering through the window. Which meant she had not been sleeping all along but pondering over love, life and what not. The feline glow in her looks meant she had been hungry for an answer. I started to rummage through all the pockets of my cognition to deliver a quick reply.

More than an answer, what bothered me was the context. Why did the question come to batter her now after 42 years of togetherness? Ever since we entered the alliance at the age of 22, we had fought many world wars, on issues as trivial as cooking, making the bed, scrubbing toilets, stealing the last sip of the laban drink to topics as grave as the ownership of gold bought with my cards, my socialising which was misconstrued as soft flirting or even philandering.

As in the end of every conflict, we lackadaisically signed on dozens of accords that a baby bloomer could think of — Magna Carta, Camp David and Ozlo — and were cheered on by our children who used such celebrations to fill their shopping cart surreptitiously, like in the geopolitics of oil and gas.

Such treaties revitalised our family bonds, until their building blocks crashed the soonest like a pack of cards, knocked down by a barrage of topics that were of least interest to the family. It was a cycle of love and hate as crazy as it can get. We were like two superpowers perennially threatening to launch their ballistic missiles at each other, and then happy to shake hands at an exotic retreat. Call it love diplomacy.

Around the same time the Covid pandemic brought the planet down to earth, she talked about her knee ache, head resting on my shoulder while the sun drowned off an empty Ajman beach, and I nudged the last empty bottles into the surf.

“My tennis elbow is worse than that,” I replied.

“Who told you to play table tennis? Learn to mind your age.”

“Who told you to walk for two hours? You aren't young either.”

“Watch the sunset instead of picking mistakes,” I whispered over the howling wind.

“You always said sunsets are painful,” she argued. “Let’s stare the setting sun in its eyes. Practise it.”

Fast-forward to the days when rents in Dubai more than doubled. We both grew stoic as truth finally sunk in the sea of conscientiousness. Egos died a sudden death as we leafed through new chapters of love, life and tonnes of medical journals — not necessarily in that order. On the weekends, our CX7 found its way to clinics instead of our favourite breakfast joint. Pills of different hues replaced cosmetics and utility bills in the sling bags we both carried.

I held her hands in a clutch of assurance as we combed the city as part of the reminiscence therapy.

“How many times did I tell you pass some orange juice?” she said this morning.

“I did, and you drank, too, darling.”

“Oops, I forgot.”

suresh@khaleejtimes.com