Penelope Syndrome

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It has been my experience that windfalls thrill us far more and for longer than fulfillment of long-cherished dreams. The one is positive while the other is negative.

Much has been written about Ulysses on his return to Ithaca after twenty years and how he got terribly bored after reunion with his family and how he was pining for more and more adventures...the chap who loved his wife and son so much and was so reluctant to leave them and go forth for battle that he tried to fake lunacy.

That about sums up the male psyche a year after marriage...they pine for their bachelorhood and its freedoms and friends and wonder how foolish they were to imagine unrelenting wedded bliss unlike the boring Heaven of Don Juan in Shaw's Man and Superman and Huck in Mark Twain.

But what about the feelings of Penelope, the wedded wife of Ulysses who remained true and faithful to her long-lost husband and tended to their only son, Telemachus, like a lioness? The default answer is that Ulysses' return home after twenty long years of pining for him must have made her exultant and they lived happily forever. But the truth is more likely to be that she must be "missing the wistfulness of missing him".

Maugham (?) wrote a short story of a jailbird pining for reunion with his ladylove. He thinks and thinks of her so much and for so long every hour every day that when the meeting at last does take place he runs away...

My Guide SDM told me that his most cherished and ardent desire was to get a good D Sc of the Calcutta University. He delayed submission by a decade or more, fortifying his thesis so much that one of his thesis-examiners remarked it deserves three Doctorates in

1: General Relativity
2. Molecular Spectroscopy
3. Quantum Mechanics.

But SDM told me that for all those encomiums, his happiness on getting his D Sc didn't last for more than 24 hours.

On the other hand, he was a village school kid in the district of Sylhet (present day Bangladesh) when he wrote his Matriculation Exam. Though he knew he would top in maths, he was so overjoyed when he came to know that he topped the Combined Exam in the whole of undivided Bengal that the moment was etched forever in his memory and he still gets a stupendous kick reliving it after 50 years.

I was a Late Kate in most of my dreams come true, especially marriage (at 36). The thrill didn't even last SDM's 24 proverbial hours...it was just a nice and healthy disillusionment. But, most unexpectedly, I got the windfall of a cute unplanned son. And to this day, I relish the moment I first saw him in his crib when he was all of 5 days in a maternity home in Jalgaon...my son! MY SON!!!

And nothing can beat the continued thrills I get when looking at Ishani day in and day out...another windfall, sumptuous by more than two orders of magnitude.

When I retired and started living in Hyderabad with my wife and son in a rented apartment, I used to pine for my 'own' 3 BHK apartment. Those were the years of the housing boom and even a 2 BHK flat was quoted at Rs 45 lakhs, which of course was like the pie in my sky. All of a sudden the bubble burst and builders were begging buyers to please book and pay, just so they could remain afloat. The prices crashed so low that they were willing to promise me a 3 BHK apartment for just Rs 23 lakhs provided we pay the entire amount up front. My son and me pooled our bank balances and took a grave risk and paid up, looking at heavens.

And then I lost all interest in the affair. My son and D-i-L were making frequent visits to the 'site' and used to report that the promised 'township' was just boulders and rock formations for a good 2.5 years. Suddenly on their next visit they found that our first block of 300 flats is touching the sky...apparently they used German Technology that needed hardly any labor and no bricks at all. The whole thing was concrete and cranes.

In another 3 months the builders were begging us to take 'possession' so they can get the remaining two lakh rupees for the car park and stuff. And within another three months my son and D-i-L completed the 'interiors' and one fine morning they took me there blindfolded and released me in the midst of our 'own' apartment.

And then it was my latest and best windfall...I never imagined we were getting for peanuts a fantastic living space flooded by light and breeze...almost akin to the thrill I got when I shifted from a dark and dingy Qrs C-1/97 to a heavenly B-140 at IIT KGP after 20 years of wait.

Every noon I wake up and get out of bed I feel thrilled by the streaming sunshine and breeze through three contiguous balconies...something I never dreamed of...

It is like sitting on the cement bench of the Harrys at KGP way back during my bachelorhood in the Faculty Hostel decade...

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