A is for Adultery

“ I don’t ever want to get married,” my cousin, who has just finished her degree from Bangalore and is back home recently, proclaims. This statement is a much thought about option after our hour’s gossip about friends who are unhappily married.
“But who lives happily ever after in reality?” I try to put sense while defending my own status as a wife. Man and woman are two species and they can never think alike, I try to reason out with them thereby explaining the reason for tiffs in marriages.
“Man and woman can never think alike but can’t the society have a united thought when it comes to the extra marital affairs? After all both man and woman who commit them are human beings.” That is a valid statement coming from a twenty-four years old unmarried cousin of mine. But I know where that wisdom comes from. She has already told me the story of her friend at least ten times now.
Pelden was in High School when she met the man of her dreams. Both of them were in the same class. Becoming a mother at ninth standard is not something one plans in life. But it happens owing to fate. Pelden decided to stay back home and raise their love child allowing her High School sweetheart Tshewang to continue his studies. Nine years later, Tshewang is a degree holder from Sherubtse and a proud entrée into the job market while pelden is a stay- at- home mother of two kids.
Pelden dreams of a home in Thimphu furnished with all modern amenities she sees and fancies in the movies while Tshewang’s plan is to set up a new apartment with the woman he has met during the Orientation program. The casual flings in college doesn’t count in his list of adultery but for somebody like my cousin, every girl that Tshewang dated is a thorn that has shredded her best friend’s heart.
One story of a friend leads to more stories about some more friends. I tell them of a neighbor who became my friend.
Tsheten was known as the most despicable woman in our neighborhood. I had gone to town with her, a week after I had landed up in the place. “Is she your friend?” a colleague of mine whom I had met the other day asks me with a dirty look on his face. Later I learnt that statement was challenging my integrity too.But I saw in Tsheten what others had failed to see. I saw the heart of the woman broken many times by her contractor husband who was always on the move with different woman each time. “Initially it broke my heart but with every woman he brought home and with every physical pain he inflicted on me, I hated him more.”
“Why didn’t you opt for divorce?” I asked, although I wanted to add,”instead of becoming like him!” but didn’t since we had known eachother for just a week.
“I am a mother of four kids. How can I deprieve my kids of their father?
And this simple statement had become a mantra for her changed life- a life plunged in the depths of adultery, a revenge she as a woman had taken on her husband.
Having narrated Tsheten’s predicament, how many us would actually lift the blame from her head and place it on her husband who virtually threw her in that dark life? But Tsheten and Tshewang would surely be viewed differently and would become a scapegoat of judgement on two different scales just because one is man and the other is a woman.
"No, I won't marry!" This sounds like the final THE END of a movie and I simply laugh at the conviction of my cousin who would tread the path of marital world sooner or later.