I've watched so many women fall apart after divorce. I've seen some sink into terrible depression, some cry day and night, refuse to speak to anyone, stop eating properly. Some, in sheer defiance, suddenly marry someone else. Others attempt suicide—and a few actually succeed.
It's not that I didn't feel pain after my divorce—I did. But mostly I was stunned. For many, many days I needed sleeping pills to sleep, had to go to counseling to make sense of it all. I kept thinking... how is this even possible! That he and I would separate after all these years! Now, after the divorce, what would I tell my parents, my friends, the neighbors, my enemies, my colleagues?
We separated mutually, without any real reason... Would anyone believe such an ordinary explanation for such a massive, difficult decision? That two people can have a mutual breakup or divorce even when love still exists between them, for other reasons entirely—our society will need much more time to become mature enough to understand this, brave enough to accept it as natural.
So be it. That's society's business. If they want to be slow about becoming smart, I have nothing to say about it. Life is short—I can't hold myself back mentally by refusing to accept a perfectly normal event. Listen, I studied accounting! I think about everything in terms of debits and credits.
But I'm never the type to explain myself. Why we separated, why I didn't wait a little longer, why I didn't try mediation—I don't think about such things myself, and when others try to, I set boundaries right away. I didn't even ask my ex-husband, whom I married for love, why he wanted the separation. Come on, can anyone force a marriage to work? Yes, people force households to survive by clinging desperately, but marriage is something else entirely. To me, household and marriage are not the same thing at all.
Marriage is something beautiful, like waking up in the morning and adding tea leaves to a kettle of milk boiling over. Marriage is the exquisite act of speaking without words while sitting quietly side by side. Marriage is as artistic as water trickling from one green leaf to another. But matching your saris with his punjabis and bed sheets to 'dutifully' post photos on social media—that's keeping house. Forgetting to look at each other while staring at your child's face—that's keeping house. Pretending to love out of fear of losing the luxurious life your partner's job or business provides—that's keeping house.
I didn't start a marriage to 'keep house,' or in plain Bengali, to simply 'eat Rezwan's rice.' I decided to build a marriage out of love. Rezwan was completely opposite to me in nature, ideals, philosophy, even religion. Yet I thought I could bear the smell of his sweat because I'd seen him toil until he bled. I could stay awake nights waiting for him to come home because I'd seen dreams flourishing in his eyes. I could stand as his shadow during his darkest days because in my terrible times, he had taught me what it means to be sheltered!
So because we had sheltered each other, we realized that somewhere, somehow, we urgently needed to let go. Because we understand each other's tender places, respect them, and try to truly read one another—that's precisely why we could make this decision together.
Just as marrying for love is natural, separating while love still exists is even more natural and beautiful, at least in my eyes. When you separate while love remains, the love survives the separation. But when you separate after love has died, nothing survives. What could be more beautiful than keeping love alive?