being? Welcome to agnosticism, where our Sunday sermons are just a bunch of us saying, “Eh?”
I imagine that my father has prayed way more than I have. Assuming that we really are alike when it comes to this and how much of his life was seemingly out of control, he must have needed to ask for more.
Shyamal was not a resentful agnostic, but he certainly had to be bitter about how some aspects of his life had turned out, especially his marriage to Bishakha and what he viewed as the lack of support from his family growing up. Right? I wasn’t so sure.
“Knowing what you know now, do you wish you picked a different way to get married?” I asked. “Regret,” as I learned here, was as foreign a word for my father as “choice” was.
“Marriage is something else. Don’t mix it up. Think of your case. Did anybody do a calculation for you that you would meet Wesley someday?” Shyamal said. “It just so happened. Wesley, in a short period of time, she impressed everybody in the family. But it so happened that you met and loved each other. It so happened that your love went deeper and deeper every day. Why? Dependence on each other. In my case, it never happened.”
But Shyamal didn’t think about regret in the way that I did, in that he didn’t think about it at all. I, on the other hand, have always replayed life decisions in my head, wondering if I made the right choice, lamenting when one led to a negative outcome. Even though my parents’ marriage was a failure, like many things in his life, Shyamal accepted it and didn’t dwell on the past.
“I’m an engineer. Could I be better off in the medical science or as a musician? I don’t know. Could be worse. Could be better. Marriage is like that,” Shyamal said.
“Do you wish that you had the chance to meet someone in the way that I met Wesley?” I asked.
Shyamal dismissed it out of hand. “There are people who have dated for five years who can’t survive marriage for one year,” he said.
I could see Wesley out of the corner of my eye. Of course, my father was right in a way. Wesley and I could connect right now and then disconnect emotionally years down the road. Even months.
But still, Wesley and I being together wasn’t as simple as picking a profession, as Shyamal analogized, or a matter of simple good luck (although there was certainly some of that). And contrary to what Shyamal said, it’s not as black and white as simply ending up with the right or wrong person. Wesley and I had taken the time to sincerely pursue each other. It took work and vulnerability. We chose to be together in a way my parents never had the opportunity to. And if we do drift apart for some reason, it will also be a choice to do so. Jobs don’t love you back in the way a significant other does. A long-term intimate connection has higher stakes compared to your career. One pays the bills. One keeps you warm.
I pressed on.
“Let me ask it this way. Given your history, do you resent the institution of arranged marriage?” I said.
“No, not at all.”
“You never thought about remarrying?” I asked.
“No, no, no, no, no. So many girls have approached me as of now,” Shyamal said.
My mind did a backflip. “Afterward, you mean?” I said, incredulously.
“Yes!” Shyamal said, clarifying that he meant in the last eleven years, not when he was with my mother.
“And you never considered it?” I said.
“No!” Shyamal let out another one of his high-pitched squeals.
“Why?!” This time I let out one of my own. He lived by himself in his old age. Finding companionship seemed like an ideal solution to me. In America, divorced parents remarry all the time.
Repeatedly, Shyamal said he had no regrets. About marrying Bishakha. About not remarrying. Really, about anything. It’s just not something he could conceive of. Life happens, and then you move on. But he did admit that he once briefly entertained the possibility of remarrying.
There was once a “very pretty” Bengali woman from New Zealand who moved to India three years prior and had “many good qualities.”
“She came here and sat down and talked to me,” Shyamal said.
“About getting married?” I asked.
The two had been connected by the woman’s relative, who happened to know him, and there was some courtship. My father said he played the