When I was a child, I tried very hard not to cry in public. It embarrassed me too much - specially after I was done and everyone seemed to look at me differently. Despite the occasional aberration my life before marriage did not give me much reason for tears, but I knew I had the capacity and tenderness - it did not take a lot to bring them on. Life with R was often about lying curled up on the living room carpet crying through the night hoping the pain would be washed away by when the tears were done.
He neither noticed nor cared. Later I would be told that I had no real problems like most people did and could afford to luxuriate in imaginary sorrow and shed tears. I must have cried more in the two years we were married than I had in my entire life preceding - it was like the floodgates had been opened and could not be shut again. I was ashamed of my weakness, irked at my inability to control those tears. It seemed that true empowerment and emancipation would come only when I could stop them and I craved for that to happen.
I believe there is only a finite pool of tears that a person has. Mine has long since been depleted. Today when something hurts, the only thing I feel is a dry, rasping kind of anger followed by a blunt pain. Try as I might, the tears refuse to come on. Every pore of me aches to sob the pain away but I just cannot do it any more. My heart's once deepest desire to stop crying has come now true. It is one of those ill conceived desires which once fulfilled cannot be undone. How I long to replenish my pool of tears, so I would be whole again.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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