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| Nisha da Cunha. Photo courtesy: epaper.timesofindia.com |
Nisha da Cunha’s short story “One Summer meeting”
is from her collection of stories Old Cypress.Through long lyrical and
meandering passages of interior monologue, the protagonist goes down memory
lane recalling the heady days of her
tempestuous extramarital affair with a man whom she compares to a sun bird that
is vibrant with beauty and movement.
The protagonist’s grown up son comes in search of
her after years of separation. The story is in the form of a baring of the
soul, a sort of confession to the son about the affair that caused the break up
of her marriage. In poetic language, the mother recalls the pain and
disillusionment of an unfulfilling marriage and the agony and ecstacy of
extra-marital love.
When the son comes to meet his mother he locates
her in the very same chapel where she used to keep clandestine trysts with her
lover. She comes to this chapel often not for asking forgiveness for breaking
the seventh commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” but to thank God for
giving her a lover who understood her .She reveals to her son the loneliness of
women locked in loveless marriages. She recalls, “I was only a possession, one
of his possessions”(104). Even to this day she remembers well how steely and
absolute her husband’s anger was. Joy had been alien to his nature. She frankly
tells her son, “I did not know joy in your father.He never showed it, nor did
he express it over anything”(105). She had endured years and years of not
talking, of not describing,of not sharing anything” (109).
But when she met the other man ,everything changed
for her. She recalls how when you fall in love “the air smells different,
colours are unusual” (108). Her husband notices the change in her “for
happiness is as difficult to conceal as real unhappiness”(109). Even to this
day she suffers from no felling of guilt or remorse. On the other hand she
cherishes and treasures the memories left to her by her lover. The other man
was the one who made her feel that she was beautiful and “had things to say and
share,worth listening to, worth sharing”(109).
But happiness always comes with a price; and the
price she had to pay for her lapse from “virtue” was her son,who was wrested
away from her by his father. She honestly reveals to her son, “Your father I
didn’t miss at all, except for realizing how many years he had deprived me of
myself,by coldness, by sterness, by such a lack of laughter.”(110) The story
ends with the protagonist’s advice to her son not to marry for he, having been
brought up by such a father might not be capable of having a totally fulfilling
relationship with any woman.
In this story the wife’s infidelity is to be seen
as a protest against the meaninglessness of her emotionally barren marriage,a
protest against the lack of sensitivity of her domineering husband. It is to be seen as a sort of metaphor for the woman breaking free from the shackles of duty-bound fidelity. It is also a metaphor for the woman's endeavour to capture a female space,the woman's struggle to be true to her inner self and to her womanhood.
Work Cited
Cunha, Nisha da. Old Cypress: Stories. New Delhi: Penguin,1991
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