My Memoirs - Volume 2 - My Love

I fell in love with her voice. We had barely spoken for a minute and I knew she was the one for me. I had not met her in person till then, I had not seen her picture, I didn’t know how old or fair or tall she was but I knew in those 60 seconds of my first phone call to her that I wanted to marry her and spend the rest of my life with her!

I then proposed to her five times and got rejected all five times in a span of two months. If it was not for the steak at “the only place” restaurant in Bangalore, she wouldn’t have even met me after our first phone call. A call where I proposed to her within a minute of my first hello. But as fate had it, I was persuasive and she was hungry and we met at “the only place” in Bangalore.

I looked at her while she ate her steak with the lovely mushroom gravy and silky mashed potatoes. I kept on looking at her as she finished her portion and pointed at my untouched plate to see if I had any plans of eating it. I was still focused on her as she finished my portion wondering how to get rid of me so she could go and have a Sunday afternoon nap at her PG accommodation!

I lived past those five rejections and left India with a heavy heart while going back to my job in New York. I also left with an important information about her childhood friend who had recently got married and moved to Atlanta. I found myself in Atlanta at her friends door where I went on my knees and implored her friend to convince her to marry me. I spent all my weekends plonked at her friends home in Atlanta till she convinced her to say yes to me. I then went through a dog test back home in India where I met with my wife’s favourite pet Danny who was instructed to maul me the moment I landed at her home in Rishra. Luckily Danny liked me and so did her parents.

When we were getting married the priest made us go around the fire and perform the “feras”, when he stopped at 4 and told me that’s how the Jain weddings are, I insisted that we do 7 "feras" so that nothing is left to chance! I wanted this lovely woman to be with me for the next 7 births and I definitely had no plans of spoiling the companionship in this birth by the technicality of the number of feras!

I can proudly take credit of head hunting the most perfect spouse any man could dream of! She is my best friend, she is my biggest fan and she is my fiercest critic. She is also the most intelligent and compassionate woman I have ever met or known.

Her heart is so pure and her laugh is so melodious. She is a live wire on a mission to make everyone’s life around her as comfortable as possible. She is the best mother a child could have, the best daughter a father could have asked for and the best friend everyone longs for.

I don’t know where she brings the strength from when I become weak. All of a sudden she transforms into a wall around me and shields me from the world and from my own self. Her belief in me is such that she doesn’t even let me consider giving up on anything. I can’t have enough of her when she is around me. I hate staying away from her and I miss her the moment I leave home on my very frequent travels. Heck, I miss her even when we are together in the same city and she steps out of the house for a few hours.

Everyone wants a large and beautiful home, expensive car, exotic vacations as a mark of happiness. For me any door that’s opened by my wife is the home I want to be in and come home to everyday of my life, any car where she sits by my side is the most luxurious and any walk I take with her is the vacation I would ever dream of.

She is a person of the strongest moral fabric. she goes through pain so she can make others happy. She hides her own aspirations, ambitions and priorities to make way for me, our daughter, her parents, my parents, my sister, her brother who is another body with her own soul, her nieces in whom her life resides, her friends, my friends, my colleagues and anyone who remotely comes in touch with her. 

Munish, I want to see you happy and I want to see you successful. I will live in a one room house, eat two meals a day if that is what it takes to assure you to chase your dreams. I am firmly with you in everything that you decide. We will get through it together

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and build businesses. I wanted to take up the toughest of challenges and excel in those. I had all these crazy ideas floating in my head of starting businesses from scratch and conquering new geographies. One day I came back home and I told my wife that I was doing very well at my job but I was not enjoying it. It was my first job but I felt I couldn’t learn anything new and I had become so good at what I did that I was able to get work done with least effort. This was not giving me the joy I was craving for and I wanted to go chase my dreams. That's when she came and made the supreme sacrifice of letting go of her own ambitions and made my dreams her own.

Over the years I took up extreme challenges, tasted great success and many failures, rubbed shoulders with the who's who while my wife waited in the shadows at our home waiting for the bell to ring so she would know I was okay.

The only phase of my life I don't like is the one where at the top of my game when I was flying high in my professional life, I made her wait endlessly, made her compromise on her ambitions, made her cry by my insensitivity. I would like to take away those nights when I was building a future for myself while my wife was alone along with my daughter. I would like to take away those neighbourhood gatherings and potluck dinners where every husband was present except me, I would like to take away that phase where unknowingly I crushed a beautiful soul by taking her for granted.She made me stronger by her support but I somewhere feel that I made her weak by not responding back and thinking that it was okay as I was doing it for her. It was not okay as actually I was doing it only for myself, my ambition, my hunger to build businesses, conquer new geographies and create magic.I hope I am able to make it up to her in the years to come.

Please take care of Aditi. Please take care of my daughter as I leave her behind to take care of my father-in-law

It took her a split second to leave her most precious possession our daughter Aditi behind when my father met with an accident and had to be airlifted to Delhi in a state of coma. I took a decision that I won't let my father die regardless of what the medical specialists were saying. Everyone thought I was being unreasonable and impractical except her. Not only she supported me but she took charge of one of the most difficult phases of my entire life. She would speak to doctors multiple times a day, discuss every vital statistics and lab results. Question the doctors on the medicines being given to my father whose body caught infection while in coma. Everyone gave up any last hope but my wife. She stood by me, she held my hand, she wiped my tears while hiding her own. She created the Miracle which got my father back from the dead after 40 days in coma. Everyone over the years credits me for being a great son but the fact is that if she was not around we wouldn't have any miracle. My father wouldn't have got another 11 years added to his life, I wouldn't be me as I am today.

No wonder, my father always treated her like a daughter and not a daughter-in-law. From the day he spoke to her on the phone and said to her that "you will be my daughter from today" to the date she got married to me and entered our family, to the day my father left us all behind, My wife was the only one with whom he had no complaints.He couldn't hear a word spoken against her.

He was not wrong about her. You take the most beautiful flower from God’s own chosen garden and I assure you that my lovely wife will come out tops on the beauty quotient inside and out.