Romance Gone Wrong

ROMANCE GONE WRONG

Romance in real life rarely seems to play out the way it does in Hindi movies or Mills & Boon paperbacks. At least, that’s been my admittedly limited experience of it. I witnessed a fair amount of awkward courtships in college, with boys trying out moves – and lines – they’d learned from movies and TV shows. These attempts never seemed to work very well and were invariably met with ego-puncturing derision.

When a businessman’s two college-going sons unexpectedly eloped with the two daughters of a widowed mother, it came as a complete surprise, especially as none of the protagonists in this little drama appeared to be especially attractive or glamorous. A colleague of those days ran off with his landlord’s daughter and despite some initial friction between both sets of parents, an amicable reconciliation eventually took place, sans much of the melodramatic histrionics that would attend such an event in a Bollywood tear-jerker.

Honestly, I would have thought my classmate was the last person to get involved in such an imbroglio. Quiet, serious and bespectacled, he didn’t fit the obvious stereotype of the campus Lothario or roadside Romeo.

The path of true(?) love rarely runs smooth, as the saying goes. The truth of this well-worn proverb was borne out to me by the abortive romance of the security guard and the delinquent domestic. By then, I was the married father of two young daughters and unhappily employed in advertising. We were renting an apartment in a residential complex where this happened. 

The security guard was one of those coarsely brutish characters whose facial expression had but two default settings; (a) suspicion and (b) hostility. Boorish and peremptory in manner, he was more of a threat to the peace of mind of the residents of the apartment complex, than any guardian of their safety and well-being.

His love interest matched him in both looks and temperament; being surly, slatternly, slovenly and slothful. She had the dubious distinction of being dismissed from service by all the ladies of the apartment complex and rarely lasted more than a month in work. This paragon of the domestic arts only survived in work on the strength of new tenants who did not know her nature or the quality of her “work” – and even that didn’t last very long. 

In this, she was aided and abetted by her three daughters who had inherited their mother’s qualities in full measure. In addition to frequent absenteeism, these sponging sisters had the habit of helping themselves to whatever they fancied in the homes they “worked” in - when they couldn’t trouble themselves to beg for the desired items. 

The domestic worker used to loudly proclaim that she would not allow any other woman to work in the apartment complex in the event of her not finding any work at all and being barred from the premises. Somehow, that day of reckoning never quite arrived. However, complaints about her malign presence did arrive frequently at the door of Security, who used to rudely brush these aside.   

From his solicitousness towards the lady and his habit of regularly engaging her in unnecessary conversation, it was deduced that the security guard nursed an unrequited passion for the domestic and was engaged in a platonic romance of sorts with her. Certainly, he was fiercely ready to defend her interests against the legitimate complaints of the residents. 

This was tolerated for some time, but as always happens in such situations, a breaking point occurred when the security guard overreached. He had the poor judgement to rudely rebuff the President of the RWA who was fed up of the sponging sisters’ habit of loitering in and littering the complex park.

The President had a quiet word with the Director of the Security Firm. The security guard ceased to come to work thereafter. The sponging sisters also vanished soon afterwards, to everyone’s relief. Their mother carried on, somehow.

I saw the security guard once after this, while stuck in a traffic jam on the way to work. He was morosely guarding a roadside industrial dump, replete with barrels of noxious chemicals and rusting, decayed machinery. The general aspect was of a hellish wasteland somewhat lacking in creature comforts. No Diwali Ka Inam, no sweets and snacks, no cup of tea or even the occasional drink of cold water proffered by the more kindly  residents...

After a few months, the security guard joined work again at the apartment complex. His recent experiences seemed to have dampened his ardour, for a certain distance had developed in his relationship with the domestic. This distance increased when the day of reckoning finally arrived and the domestic was comprehensively unemployed. 

She was evicted shortly afterwards and never acted on her threat to bar the apartment complex to other domestic workers – perhaps due to her erstwhile admirer’s advisory warning about the police action that this would attract.