Redrafting a spouse

Now there is something more to be mentioned about this. When I married my wife, she was a totally uneducated girl. Though fair in complexion, the aura of an uneducated village girl was there in her total features. Even her Malayalam was of the uneducated variety. However, in terms of formal education, she had gone through her college graduation education. Yet, she couldn’t pass. In terms of worldly knowledge, geographical information, English reading and such, she was an absolute zero. I think she came across a copy of the Reader Digest for the first time after her marriage. Even though her graduation subject was English, I don’t think that she had any idea as to what was an English classical novel.

In my own household, even though the sly idea of bringing a servant to the household to take care of my parent was there among my sisters and brother, I was not aware of it. But then the moment she came into my house, I was aware that this was the underlying intention of all those present.

Even my younger brother tried to address her with a Nee. But I stoutly did not allow this. This determination was to cost me heavily; but I strove to bear the brunt.

I was quite adamant about bringing up the mental stature of my wife. So to her also, I strove to use higher indicant words. So, instead of using the word Aval (lower she) to her, I always used the words Avar (higher she). It was seen as a mad man’s posture by the others around me, who couldn’t bear the upsetting of social positions that I was proposing through the use of word codes.

In the end what happened was that she was given a higher than usual status. Moreover, the fact that my parent had been a senior official of the state government, coupled with the fact that one of my sisters was a teacher in an elite national engineering college, another sister a paediatrician and my brother working in The Times of India, wandering all around the place notifying this fact, all created a higher being feeling in my wife; when she was to accompany any of her own family relatives; or was accosted by them.

As to me, I was always travelling all round the state attending to my own business.

The house we lived was palatial in comparison to her family house of that time.

I strove to teach her English speaking, and desperately tried to make her take to reading English. She used to gloss over the pages of the Reader’s Digest in a blank manner. As to classical books, I did not take pain to make her read. When I first tried to make her speak in English, she simply told in a offensive manner: My father is not an Englishman.

This statement was probably promoted by her instilled duty of loyalty to her familial traditions, which she wanted to place on record as she was willingly moved ahead to ditch it. Moreover, the constant indoctrination by my own family members that I was a non-entity, as well as the sudden superiority of articulation that English afforded her could all have aided in her assertive mention of her non-English parentage.

{Another thing that I may take up later was the horoscope content of hers and a peculiar personality contradiction in her. For, I have some experience to sense that one’s life codes may be hinted at in one’s horoscope. Very powerfully at that.}