Skip to main content

Relationships


“I am your handiwork made flesh.  You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born... I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love; your destructive, selfish, wanton love.  Your love looks just like hatred.... I was honest and you turned me into your lie.  This is not me.  This is not me.  This is you.”

Salman Rushdie’s character, Boonyi, in Shalimar the Clown, spits out the above dialogue to her husband Max Ophuls.  Relationships have the tremendous power to wreak such havoc on people.  Relationships can be devastating. 

Relationships can be beautiful too.  It depends on the people involved, their attitudes and motives.

Relationships are quite like chemical reactions.  The elements can enter into strong and beautiful bonds creating admirably different compounds.  But unlike in chemical compounds, the individuals should be able to retain their own unique personalities in human relationships.  In a good relationship, the individuals grow and help each other grow. 

The primary ingredient in a sound relationship is mutual understanding and acceptance of the otherness of the other.  When I understand that the other person is such and such and I am also able to accept those traits, I enter into a beautiful relationship – provided the other person reciprocates with similar understanding and acceptance. 

That’s not easy, however.  Most people are not much different from Rushdie’s Max Ophuls. In varying degrees. They like to impose themselves on the other.  And go on to create lies out of honesty.  Re-create the other in one’s own image or after one’s own ideal about the spouse or friend.  Since people are not insensate clay to be moulded by a craftsman or craftswoman, such attempts at re-creating are doomed to end in disaster.  The other individual ends up as a living lie, an  impostor, a fragmented personality, a victim, unless she/he ends the relationship and walks away to rediscover her-/himself.

I have had quite a few friends who insisted on reshaping me because they thought that my soul stood in terrible need of redemption.  Some thought that I had to be tamed if not reformed altogether.  Some had ulterior motives like breaking me in order to please the boss who would award him a promotion as a reward. 

I have never understood why I attracted so many such ‘friends’ and may never.  So much so that I have embraced virtual solitude.  But I know that relationships have their beauty in human life.  Relationships can enrich.  I have had at least a couple of such experiences too.  Not everything has been dark.  Some light is good.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be here as a writer – I mean, blogger.  But I do wish I had met different people on the way.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 156: #Relationship

  
Labels:

Comments

  1. Durga Prasad DashFebruary 10, 2017 at 10:25 PM

    Solitude gives an opportunity to build a beautiful relationship.. often neglected... It is with oneself.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sunaina sharmaFebruary 11, 2017 at 4:10 AM

    I agree wholly with Durga's point - often to be appreciated, we tend to become what we are not. Other times, due to criticism, we become what we are not. We have multiple selves in front of other people. Sometimes, we are deluded in our own eyes too. Solitude lets us reach our inner selves.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jyotirmoy SarkarFebruary 11, 2017 at 9:18 AM

    Nicely written and good to know about your experience...it helps always.

    ReplyDelete
  4. MeenalSonalFebruary 12, 2017 at 8:12 AM

    Acceptance is very important in relationship, good to know that you were always on positive side of it :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 12, 2017 at 9:47 AM

      I was a slow learner in this. But most people around me usually seemed eager to teach others 😀

      Delete
  5. Alok singhalFebruary 13, 2017 at 12:52 AM

    Everything has its ups and downs...even relationships, as you rightly pointed out. However, never suffer too much in the wrong hands.

    Life would be meaningless if it goes just in one direction!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 13, 2017 at 6:53 AM

      Sometimes one is rendered impotent by the overwhelming might of one's'benefactors'!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ivan the unusual friend

When you are down and out, you will find that people are of two types. One is the kind that will walk away from you because now you are no good. They will pretend that you don’t exist. They don’t see you even if you happen to land right in front of them. The other is the sort that will have much fun at your expense. They will crack jokes about you even to you or preach at you or pray over you. This latter people are usually pretty happy that you are broke. You make them feel more comfortable with themselves even to the point of self-righteousness. Ivan was an exception. When I slipped on the path of life and started a free fall that would last many years before I hit the bottom without a thud but with enormous anguish, Ivan stood by me for some reason of his own. He didn’t display any affection which probably he didn’t have. He didn’t display any dislike either. There was no question of preaching or praying. No jokes either. Ivan was my colleague for a brief period at St Joseph’s
14 comments
Read more

Joe the tenacious friend

AI-generated illustration You outgrow certain friendships because life changes you in ways that nobody, including you, had expected. Joe is one such friend of mine who was very dear to me once. That friendship cannot be sustained anymore because I am no more the person whom Joe knew and loved to amble along with. And Joe seems incapable of understanding the fact that people can change substantially. Joe and I were supposed to meet one of these days after a gap of more than two decades. I scuttled the meeting rather heartlessly. Just because Joe’s last messages carried words that smacked of intimacy. My life has gone through so much devastating fire that the delicate warmth of intimacy has become repulsive. Joe was a good friend of mine while we were in Shillong. He was a post-graduate student and a part-time schoolteacher when I met him first. I was a fulltime schoolteacher teaching math and science to ninth and tenth graders. My dream was to postgraduate in English literature an
11 comments
Read more

Kailasnath the Paradox

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa
9 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
11 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more