Long ago, when I set out on my lifetime adventure and decided to marry an army officer, I was told that I would need to mend my slightly reclusive ways and become a bit more sociable.
“You’ll have to interact with officers and soldiers and their wives and families on a daily basis,” friends said. “There will be parties and get-togethers and welfare activities to participate in. Even if you spend your day at work, you’ll have many social obligations to fulfil in the evenings. So better gear up and hone your social skills.”
My heart sank at the thought of a constant stream of social activities. I was not used to “joining in” and always preferred my own company or that of a close friend to that of a group, however congenial the members of that group may be.
I wanted to cut and run — but who does that when their knight in shining armour comes into their lives on what seems to be a glorious steed? (Later, the scales may peel from one’s eyes and that scenario may fail on all three counts — the knight may turn out to be just an average guy albeit with an attractive twinkle in his eye, the shining armour of olive green may lose its appeal when there is a surfeit of it around and the glorious steed may reveal itself as a nuts and bolts and caterpillar-tracked T-Something tank that drowns out all sounds as it rumbles by. Your oohs and aahs are definitely silenced — but all that came later.)
In the first flush, when everything was new and exciting, socialising didn’t seem that onerous a task for me — and, to my pleasant surprise, I also learnt that there were long periods of time when our knights were away: Either on courses where we wives could not accompany them, or on exercises in the middle of nowhere, or on temporary duty somewhere; and in those times, we were on our own.
Then, as now, not everyone wanted the solitude of a spouse’s absence — and the subsequent feeling that there was “nothing to do”. So some of us went off “home” to parents or in-laws, some of us stayed in station — if children were in school — and brought family in to keep us company, and some like me, continued as we were, going about our office or teaching jobs and returning to an empty house or meeting up with new friends in similar situations, experiencing camaraderie we had not expected, or revelling in our solitude and discovering aspects of ourselves we had never known existed.
In a time before we had television sets at home, these long months of “nothing to do” became extremely productive times. We knitted, crocheted, wrote stories, prepared pickles and preserves, painted, learnt or taught each other decoupage and ceramic flower-making, etched, attempted ambitious craft projects — which we could leave in the spare room in various stages of progress for weeks without having to clear up and be ready for “social duties”. And it was always thrilling to get back from work to an empty house to review whatever project I was involved in and see how much more would get done before I set off to work the next day.
And, when that dust-covered knight returned and the social activity resumed, I could actually enjoy it because I knew that another assignment would soon come up and another stint of solitude was just around the corner again.
Of course, I needn’t have looked as upbeat as I did when I waved him off the next time and I could have held off on the freedom dance until his vehicle was out of sight, but you can’t do everything right, can you?
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
