Ladies Coupe Read Free Page B

enough mood. Amma was combing her hair and singing softly. ‘Why don’t you give music lessons?’
    Amma looked up in surprise.
    Akhila hastened to explain. ‘You sing so well and Appa always says that you have one of the best singing voices he has ever heard. Why don’t you teach music like Karpagam’s
mother teaches dance? Then you would have some money of your own …’ she finished lamely, wondering if she had said too much.
    ‘I don’t approve of what Karpagam’s mother is doing. All kinds of people come into their house. Brahmins and non-brahmins. Do you think your father would allow such comings and goings on here? Don’t you know how strict he is? Anyway, do you think your father would let me? “If I wanted a working wife, then I would have married someone like that,” he told me when we were first married. “I want my wife to take care of my children and me. I don’t want her so caught up with her job that she has no time for the house or for taking care of my needs.” And that’s all I wanted to be as well. A good wife.’
    Amma had her own theories on what a good wife ought to be like. First of all, no good wife could serve two masters – the masters being her father and her husband. A good wife learnt to put her husband’s interests before anyone else’s, even her father’s. A good wife listened to her husband and did as he said. ‘There is no such thing as an equal marriage,’ Amma said. ‘It is best to accept that the wife is inferior to her husband. That way, there can be no strife, no disharmony. It is when one wants to prove one’s equality that there is warring and sparring all the time. It is so much easier and simpler to accept one’s station in life and live accordingly. A woman is not meant to take on a man’s role. Or the gods would have made her so. So what is all this about two equals in a marriage?’
    Amma left all decisions to Appa. ‘He knows best,’ she said. ‘We have never had to regret any decision that he has taken, even when it was on my behalf.’
    Which is why, when they had been married a few years and Amma inherited a small piece of land in her village, she had watched her husband sell it without a word of dissent. Several years later a cousin had written to tell her that the same piece of land had been sold for ten times its original
price. ‘If we had kept it, we would have been able to buy a small house of our own,’ Amma sighed.
    When Akhila sighed along with her, she changed her expression and said, ‘Mind you, I’m not saying that your father made a hasty decision. Who would have known that the land prices would soar so high and that too in a place like Mettupalayam?’
    Amma’s family was quite rich. But she was the daughter of a first wife who had died when she was eleven years old. Her mother had died trying to give birth to a baby boy who hadn’t survived either. A year later, her father married again. He was too smitten by his second wife and the sons she produced easily and regularly at eighteen-month intervals to bother too much about a daughter. When Amma was of marriageable age, he arranged for her wedding. A very austere one with Appa. After all, it had been arranged and settled many years ago. In fact, the moment she was born.
    There was enough of everything, so no one had any reason to find fault, but there wasn’t too much money or jewellery or anything that was of any enduring value. The piece of land had been her only inheritance from a father who left everything else to his sons.
    But Appa had been adamant that she have nothing more to do with her family that had treated her so shabbily and he decided to sell the land. ‘From now on, I am all you have,’ he had said. And Amma had accepted that happily. After her mother’s death, no one, had loved her as much. And this was to her another declaration of how much she meant to him.
    Many years later, Akhila mentioned to a colleague and perhaps her only real woman friend,