I was married in the month of January in 2013. Exactly a year after, the courts declared me divorced.
Sounds like smooth sailing, right? It was anything but. What’s ironical is that, I’d have preferred never to have gotten married. It wasn’t a label I actively sought and I would have been happy to have done without it. Had December 2008 not happened.
After fighting my parents for almost a decade, my older sister managed to win them over to the idea of her marrying the man she loved. This she did in December 2008. Even in the midst of a perfect and beautiful ceremony, my father’s tears were evident; he broke down as the new man in my sister’s life smeared vermillion across her forehead. Exactly 15 days later, he broke down again – this time, the tears were of excruciating grief and the unimaginable loss of a bereaved parent. My older sister had died by electrocution.
The Day My World Came Crashing Down...
Our world thudded to a dull, aching halt. I slipped into depression and began to lose oodles of weight. Some part of me had died. I believe my parents at the time thought constant company was what I needed to get me through. They began searching for a prospective groom. It was around this point that a childhood friend stepped in, offering to be the good Samaritan. He offered to be the companion and partner that I needed, one who would bring an absolute turnaround in my then-adrift life. I hoped the same.
How utterly mistaken I was. After subjecting me to extreme emotional and mental torture, the man left me in absolute tatters. I shall refrain from the details.
The Divorced Woman and the Other Half
I was now divorced, and somehow, inextricably, the tag of a ‘divorcee’ attached itself to me like a leech. It refused to leave me, no matter where I went. Relatives began asking my parents all kinds of offensive questions, shaming my bewildered mother and father. I had never been too fond of my relatives (who is?) and now they were gleefully flinging mud at my parents.
It wasn’t just them. I was stunned at how my office colleagues were reacting to the news of my divorce. Men thought I was an easy target for casual sex. Women thought I was ‘loose’ (a whore, to be precise). My life as a divorced woman had officially begun. The ‘tag’ seeped into my very being, stripping me off all joy and gaiety I had ever known. I was suddenly unrecognisable even to myself – a sad and serious woman.
I lost friends whose parents thought that I’d be an evil influence on their children. I lost all faith in relationships and began to realise friendship was nothing but a big sham. Suddenly, something like a Dil Chahta Hai seemed like a bittersweet memory.
The ‘Perils’ of Falling in Love with a Divorcee
I am in love now and my partner and I are thinking of marriage. But he is currently facing a dilemma: how will he introduce me to his parents as a divorced woman? How will he say, “Here, meet my fiancee. She’s a wonderful woman – but a divorcee”? My parents have no hope from this relationship because they know no parents will agree to their ‘freshman’ of a son getting married to a woman who’s already lost her virginity to another man.
Meanwhile, I hear the other party to my divorce is gearing up for a second marriage. I, on the other hand, am a ‘tainted’ woman and for tainted women, there are no takers in society.
No matter how liberal and progressive you think society has become, you have only to ask the person who suffers its tyrannies to know the realities. There is no truer testimony.
Divorce is NOT a taboo. Isn’t it better to walk out than to suffer your whole life in pain?
(Gandharvi is a young woman who bravely bears the scars of life’s battles and writes about them.)
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