A PAINTING AND THE TALE OF A MATRIMONIAL HUNT

Sharing a slice of an autobiography with an audience is like baring  oneself unabashedly on a crowded grandstand. Still we love telling stories from our lives. Here is one from my premarital days with a dash of fiction thrown in for flavour and zing.

    

        First of all, the painting!

     Three horsemen, their faces barely visible as their heads are bent forward with the galloping speed of the horses adorn my wall. A young woman painted it with broad spatula strokes about forty year ago. What became of that girl and how this painting landed on my wall? Thereby hangs a tale!

        Now the tale!   

     I joined Bank’s service at a small sleepy  town in Himachal Pradesh sometime in 1973. The Bankers were considered sought after commodity in matrimonial market those days. So the stray proposals for marriage kept dropping in my life also. I ignored them all as I had very strict, somewhat idealistic, priorities regarding my prospective life partner. But one offer came through a close friend who used to join me on drinks almost every third evening. An orchardist friend of his was looking for a match for his sister and my name had been casually dropped in. I vaguely felt interested. A meeting was arranged one evening to discuss the matter. The ice was broken after the first round of drinks. The orchardist told about his sister. She was an architect, doing a government job, homely, talented, not beautiful, but understanding and compassionate. I also placed all my cards on the table. Then I asked for a permission to meet the girl so that we could know each other and make a decision. Nothing doing, the orchardist’s response was a point-blank refusal. Theirs was a traditional family; they could not allow such a meeting. Thus we reached a deadlock. We had a few more rounds of drinks; the orchardist became a good friend. We forgot all about his sister or the matter of marriage.

            One year rolled by. I was transferred to Shimla and my freewheeling bachelor existence and the hunt for life partner continued as usual. Some proposals did come my way and I also got chance to interview some girls. But nothing clicked. Perhaps my parameters for a ‘suitable girl’ were too strict to be met in reality. In one instance I did meet a girl closest to my dreams. Her parents had approached me and arranged a date for us. We talked for almost three hours sipping coffee at Shimla’s legendary Devico’s restaurant. Almost all my stipulations for the ideal match got ticked. But at the end she coyly told me that her romantic interest laid somewhere else and hesitantly requested me to turn down the proposal. In another instance, I went all the way to Dehradun to encounter a girl in response to a Matrimonial advertisement. She came to meet me with her own list of priorities and found me woefully lacking in most of her expectations.

I was almost on the verge of exasperation in my pursuit when, one evening, a friend took me to a painting exhibition at Gaiety Theater. As if being swayed by the winds blowing from the future, I found myself standing before and admiring the canvas depicting the three horsemen. I wanted to buy the painting but the organisers told me that it was not for sale.I made inquiries about the artist. She was a girl from an orchardist family working in a government architectural outfit. The name also sounded slightly familiar. All the pieces of jigsaw fitted. I rang up my friend at the small sleepy Himachal town and asked him to tell his orchardist friend that ‘Barkis is willing!’ He knew his Charles Dickens well enough to understand my point.

            So that is how the painting and its creator landed in my life, the former being my most prized possession and the latter the most serendipitous thing happened to me in my whole existence. This entire episode made me realise that we do not have any freedom of choice in our lives. Everything is written, everything is preordained – our births, our deaths, our spouses too!