in some ways the relationship had been - abusive - indirectly. all those years i had to put up with the snobbery and disapproval of his family - who always thought i wasn't good enough for him, that (when we were in school) my grades were mediocre, and how could she have been a gep kid, they ask, look at her grades! (that i remembered clearly because it really did hurt,) and then after jc, i was not a government scholar, was not at a school they considered first-rate (this is virginia they're thinking about, by the way) and then there always was the question of my background - my family? they looked down on my parents because they are only schoolteachers (but said to me, more than once, sententiously, if you don't mind me saying, teaching is a real vocation! (the prefatory if you don't mind me saying giving it all away) and we weren't wealthy, and were not quite of their class (class? absurd! they were new-moneyed angmohified banking professionals. we were cheena intelligentsia - but you would have thought i was straight out of the gutter.) and i was heathen and that was bad, oh very bad, and we haven't even got on to my appearance - being fat, not being pretty, or demure, and incid if his father were him he wouldn't date someone taller than him. and on and on.

when i look back now at a list like that i don't know how i thought i could have put up with these in-laws - they are people i would have despised if i had met them in the open street - but families are always part of the package and i was determined to love everyone and surely, surely they will one day accept me. i learned to be fair - accounted the observable strengths in them, found virtues in their youth. and they never were openly hostile - that much i can say - and despite their dislike they did their best to accommodate us, included me in family dinners, paid the long distance phone bills when i was away - and i was grateful for that. i couldn't understand them on principle, but i tried to like them. and yet all the time, at their home, amongst the relatives, when i was not there, criticism and disapproval went on steadily and loudly, he bore the brunt of the criticism - and then he took it out on me by promptly repeating them to me - perhaps deep down he did wish i were easier to accept for his family. in the last years i thought they may have come to accept me - i went to family dinners and they were all kind - very kind - how i remember - he was the pet of all the family - the eldest and only grandson - had to think about marrying well, marrying right.

and now this news - (and i wouldn't be so astonished if he hadn't always used to say marrying before 30 would be irresponsible and dreadful for his fledgling career and now at 25, less than a year out of college, and i don't think he has even completed the first year of his bond? - getting married) - not only forces me to recollect, with his name, the unpleasantness of the past, not least the sudden memory of all the past indignities, contrasted with the image of the new bride being ushered in with lavish welcome, though that, i admit, may well be my own imagination. and the news, and its very conventional nature, made me realise now that in those years i had been seduced into a what we always called the bonsai life too - you know, trim your branches, attain minituarised and conventional perfection, and that i still retain, from those years, some desire for it afterall.

oh no, please don't think i don't realise that it has everything to do with myself too - being not quite sorted out these past three years. what von calls "edge" was never easy. one doesn't regret, ever, but one is tempted to be comfortable. if i were more certain of my own academic future and had more of a sense of growth and direction - then i might have been briefly angered and then carried on. but the news is coming at a time where i am low in confidence and full of insecurities and general uncertainty about my future - so that the temptation towards that life resurfaces as the fear of sneers from those people whose opinions i didn't used to care about, and readiness to buy into that life which i once scorned, then tried to become, and then am left feeling vaguely like a failure for not being a success on those terms defined precisely by the same people i despised.