My Wife and Sleepless in Seattle

Why am I writing this?

Who would read a review of a movie which has released 20 years back and although a few people still watch it in DVDs and internet people in general are not very much aware of it right now.

However people do things which sometimes defy reasons. Or there is a more ulterior subtle reason which even the person who is doing it cannot fathom.

Sleepless in Seattle was movie made in 1993 starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and IMDb  rates it a bit above average (6..7). It is a story well told (writer Jeff Arch) and it revolves around the theme l “love”. Particularly love of a bereaved husband for his deceased wife. The light had gone out of his life until in a quirk of fate he meets a woman because his eight year old son answers a radio talk show. The love he once thought impossible again (as dearly he loved his wife) lights up his life once more.

After the movie ends you feel a quiet satisfaction.  The movie captures the intangible thing called “love” in a compelling way. Particularly the love which means care, companionship and the inner nearness. The love which a husband/wife feels for his wife/husband with whom he is in love. For which he/she can forgive thousand folly of the other one and can do almost anything for the other. He /she can bear physical distress, humiliation and sometime even die. It is not the wild kind of love which craves for wild physical intimacy but a gentle hug which embraces all life. Because with this particular kind of love the hinge pin of life is the other person. Whatever you do, your goals and striving for success is permanently locked with this person in life. The stars, the cosmos is meaningless without the other. In one of the most touching scenes the man tells his son with excruciating care and love how his (the son’s)mother could peel an apple at one go, which was one of the million other things he loved about his wife.

And here I got involved with the movie. It is an enjoyable movie and quite a hit (it was made with $21 million and grossed more than 10 times the money in box office). But it meant a lot more than any other good movie to me. Because it involves the central point why I continue to live.

Have you ever had this fear of losing something immensely valuable? I think almost everyone has. And although you have not lost it your mind is aggrieved because you think that one day you will lose it and feel that it is already lost. My wife is, many would say an ordinary woman whose face is perhaps beautiful, walks rather painfully slowly, does not have a figure worth any attention, but to me she is more valuable than my own life. Although she is very near me most of the time I feel like I have not got enough of her. I fear losing her and sometimes feel as if I have lost her. So many times I ponder what life would be without her. It will be like I will be blinded and maimed for the rest of my life or even worse.

We do not have much physical intimacy. I have forgotten when I last had sex with her (I am 55 now). And we have fights, sometimes stormy, about little things of life. We do finger point each for not doing this and that and she and I shout at each other at the top of our voice. Yet when I snuggle beside her and she tells me that she had seen an orange colored cat which even said “meow” when she approached him the world melts within me. The dog “Nyaota” comes up in the conversation. He looks imploringly for biscuits and when my wife gives a few to him he crawls up her sari with his two legs to say his love to her. He also makes a squeaky sound with his voice to show his joy when he encounters her. My wife tells all these to me and I feel that only things in universe that matters are the cat and Nyaota. I also tell her a few stories of my own, like the cat in the street that seemed worried and busy and careworn with life. She giggles at this and asks me to tell more.

My wife also is a poet. And I think she is a great poet. Although world may not know her name now we dream someday whole world would know it. When she writes something which she thinks good she come up and tells me “hey listen to what I have written”. I cannot always hear her immediately because I may be busy with some other things but I always feel those words crawled in the note book someday will make her and me proud.

When I think of myself I feel I am both a great and small person. I have cheated my wife whom I love so much a few times in net (physical want takes form you do not want it to) and not earn enough to support her. I got a good education and became a bachelor of engineer. But I became a failed engineer and spent most of 20 years of life in confusion. It is very recently I am doing what I really like to do but unfortunately that is not enough to earn me a livelihood . And my cheated wife trudges slowly her way to office which she hates just  to support us. Sometimes  I feel pathetic and once again go to job sites and seek for an immediate job and go back to office life. Yes, money. That will save everything. But I know that will stop me doing what I like most and kill me inwardly but let me have perhaps a decent life financially and my wife will not have to go to office. On the other hand I think of things I like to do and do easily. Like writing on everything that moves me emotionally. I feel someday someone will notice my obscure articles somewhere and give me money for these. Because these are works of love. And when I do things I like to do I feel great. I think my life is of worth something in this world because I have done something which came from deep within myself…they are original…completely mine.

Love is the most selling thing in the world. As I told you the movie was a hit and grossed ten times the amount it was made with, telling about love. As my wife calls to come to her chest sometimes when she feels lonely and I smother my face in her bosom I feel like it has value beyond money and is eternal. As I wish I could melt inside her chest that this love even can bring something we dearly need, namely money. I wrote this article about love because perhaps it will bring me little money someday.

The man in the movie lost his wife and found a new woman. I fear that. I do not want a new woman in life ever. I just want that my wife become healthy and happy and fit ,a successful person in life without ever having to do the things she does not like.

The new woman in my life would be She.