The Great Man's Wife

An old post I wrote after meeting someone. It was lying in draft. Had forgotten to post it, God knows why!

The Great Man's Wife spoke with the faintest hint of an accent. All those years of first doing her masters in the US and then spending a considerable amount of time living and working there had left their mark on her speech. Her home was open, big and for the want of a better term, earthy. Red brick walls on the exterior, limewashed walls with the right niche hollows in the interior, plants spilling tastefully into the living area and the lawn giving a view of the greens outside. The outdoor furniture was simple but possibly expensive and you couldn't miss the discreetly kept but too prettily painted to be missed terracotta kitchen waste composter. The drink was organic as were the biscuits.

I nibbled on all that health as she told me the story of how her business came along. Though it wasn't as much business as 'economic empowerment.' as she repeated. The Great Man's Wife enlisted women from villages in the outskirts of Bangalore to transfer her much researched creativity onto silk stoles, blouses and on special customised requests, usually from her expat friends who 'understood and appreciated these things' sometimes even on a jacket, a wall hanging on a sari.

Thanks to the soothing combo of the garden breeze, juice and often heard words, I may have been part asleep as she spoke but did catch words of vital importance like 'at the grassroots level,' 'self-sustaining' "at the ground level,' 'preserving heritage,' and so on.

It's good work no doubt but I do wish it was done without the congratulatory self-pat on the back, that is meant to be invisible but yet, is visible enough. And then I thought perhaps I am getting too cynical, that even with the kids abroad, the huge house in the middle of the city and the works of art dotting the walls, she does mean it when she says that at heart she still is very middle class. That she belives in giving as much as she has got. That even now, everything she does is centred around the Great Man and his approval.

And somewhere through the chink, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I spotted a rather lonely woman.