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Love and friendship
Only the other day a young friend of mine, a rising barrister, suddenly descended upon me and insisted that I should immediately accompany him to this house as his parents had suddenly arrived there from their native village and would like me to have dinner with them. I know that this young man and his wife are very hospitable and although he took his glass of brandy it was in abundance for the guests, but he told me something in the car which upset me considerably. It appears that an astrologer had paid them an visit just a couple of hours back and had predicted that his mother would leave this world before his father.
Now I know that every Hindu woman (and in india by far and large Muslim women also) always pray or to put in Bengail that she may be laid on the funeral pyre with the vermilion mark on the parting of the hair (sinthisindur) which is a sign that she is not a widow. That is to say she would rather die as an akhandasaubhagyavati rather than live for a hundred years as a gangaswarupa (these terms are not familiar in Bengal and some other provinces, but will be easily understood) but nevertheless it is a crul faux pas to speak of the death of a wife before her husband.
But I was completely bowled over when I met the parents and heard the opinion of the mother regarding her predicted death as an akhandasaubhagyavati. Oh no, she said firmly but sweetly, I would not dream of popping off (in Bengalitensne jawa- a humorous slang like say kicking the bucket) before him. while she looked at the thin emaciated and a very silent gentleman with infinite tenderness in her eyes. Oh, no, she continued, If I should die earlier he will be as utterly helps as an orphan of six months. He will just perish inspire of my three daughters-in-law who are extremely fond of him but cannot give him the company he is accustomed to. And I was throughly convinced that she was perfectly right.
Here then was a case of love turning into friendship in old age, which has been described by the Grand Maitre of tender scenes, Alphonse Daudet in, his famous short : Lex Vieux.
While staying in a abandoned mill in Provence he received a request from a Parsian friend to call on his grandparents who lived a few miles away. Daudet goes and on seeing them says. I was touched to find them so like each other! With a fringe and some yellow ribbons he (the grandfather) might have been called Mamettee (the grandmother), Even in their infirmity they resembled. Daudet sitting between the two of them had to go on and on chattering away (Et, patati : et patata) on their dear and above all brave (in the French sense) grandson Maurice. The old man would draw closer to me to say Speak louder-Shes a little hard of hearing
And she on her part would say :
A little louder, pray… He does not hear very well…
Through the communicating door Daudet saw two little beds and I could not keep my eyes off them. They were hardly bigger than cradles and I pictured them at break of day when they are still buried under their fringed curtains. Three Oclock strikes. This is the hour when all old peo ple wake :
Are you asleep Mamette?
No, my dear.
Here I must draw the readers attention to the very important fact that in the French original it is not mon cher which would be my dear but MON AMI which strictly speaking is MY FRIEND. And that is exactly what I have been driving at right from the begining. Love, passionate love, turns into friendship and it is impossible to say when and how the process begins. But when it is completed the husband and wife, at least according to Daudet, resemble each other. It is therefore not quite wrong that in certain parts of the Persian-speaking countries a couplet is recited by the bridegroom, after the formal wedding ceremony is over :
Man tu shudam, tu man shudi, man tan shudam, tu jan shudibad as in Ta kasi no guyad, man diagram, tu digari.
I have become you, and you have become me, I have become the body and you have become jan.
So that no one may say after this you are different and you are different.
