Skip to main content

Being Whimsical

Met V after fifteen years and saw some shades of the person I had known back then. She always impressed me with her boldness and confidence at work. She and her then boyfriend owned a marketing agency. She sold and he executed - they worked very well together. V used to be coy about her relationship with N. He was always introduced by the title on his business card and there was no mention of anything else. I worked closely with both of them for about a year and observed the signs of a warm and loving relationship. I was divorced and raising J alone back then and often wondered if V and N had just by stroke of luck found themselves through work and then started a company together. Knowing of her hesitance to talk about her personal life, I never asked. 

Over lunch that afternoon, I learned that N and her are married and have a teen-aged daughter together. Counting back, that kid was likely already born when we first met. I seem to recall vaguely that she had a baby she was always stressed about leaving behind. Not being able to tell her clients about her marital status and how it intersected with her business relationship with N, must have created complications but she just dealt with it best she could. She also mentioned a previous marriage and a period of widowhood. All of these events had occurred in her life before she was thirty. 

V has started and sold a few companies since then and works as a freelance advisor to startups now. The family lives in rural France because they fell in love with the village they visited a few years ago and just decided to stay on just for the lark. Now they feel pretty rooted there and its their home. That was always the thing about V that I found fascinating. Her story was never static and never boring. She was constantly re-inventing herself and there was no telling what version of V you would see if you met her after a hiatus. She has always inspired me to go off in directions unknown and unexplored and see what's the worst that can happen. In her case, even in the worst case, she got to have a fantastic adventure.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more