I've been a writer for as long as I remember. I debuted with
a story about my grandmother and a tiger that she scared away. Scrawled in a
three-year-old’s handwriting, with a red marker pen on a scrap of paper, the
tale was born from the depths of my quirky imagination. After that I was on a
roll, writing, thinking, composing. I graduated to poems, then stories, and
then articles and D-I-Y pieces for newspapers. I kept diaries, wrote letters to
friends and loved the written word.
Even now, all these years after that first story, I think
better on paper. The paper is a place where I make sense of what’s going on
around me, in my life, home and heart. Thinking my thoughts without paper is
akin to a storm in a teacup. My thoughts swirl and dip, turning ponderous and
sometimes dark, whirling at a speed that soon goes beyond my control. This is
when I need paper and fistfuls of written words to rein those thoughts in, give
meaning to them, express them rather than box them in.
But as good as I am with pen and paper, writing and
thinking, it’s the deepest of my emotions that I find difficult to craft with
words. I can’t speak them and neither can I write them as well as I’d like to.
Some emotions, like tiny nuggets of gold, unpolished shards that really are
diamonds, stay embedded in my mind, waiting to be mined, waiting to be polished
and shined and placed in neat rows.
So today, I’ll try something that doesn't come naturally to
me - infuse my thoughts with my emotions, capture eight years of marriage in a
few lines, write something for my husband and best friend.
As we turn eight as husband and wife, soul mates and
friends, I’m grateful for the gifts that marriage to S has brought me. By
gifts, I do not mean the Smartphone and Kindle, the platinum ring and handloom
sarees (tangible gifts bestowed on me over all the anniversaries), but the
gifts of patience and companionship, lack of judgments and abundance of good times.
The willingness to talk things out and sort through the tanglewoods of my
twirled thoughts when I’m shadowed by clouds of confusion. I’m humbled and
happy by how this person, my husband and partner, accepts me as I am, flaws,
moles and all, without once trying to change me into someone else or
criticizing me for who I am. I’m thankful for his steady hand – a hand that has
held mine through numerous ups and downs. I’m thankful for his wisdom, for him,
for the kind of person he is. I’m thankful for the world and home and family we've created together, for the quiet happiness we've filled it with.
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