Happiness is the thing we want to steal from every corner of our life. We run behind it. A beggar and Mukesh Ambani run with equal fever to be happy. But we really do not know what the happiness is. I too did not know. But once I got married, I came to know on very next day that what the happiness was. But then it was too late. The train had left the platform and I was open to all the vagaries of weather. To day I earnestly believe that my marriage was the triumph of my imaginations over my intelligence. I had imagined a heaven on the earth. I doubt, now, that I might have been mentally unstable in those days.

Being a topper in college examinations, I had sincerely believed that I was a wise me, a man without an iota of foolishness. But that was my perfect illusion, as I was unaware that there was a splendid fool in me. I was to be proved as one of the greatest fools in the world. The accident occured : I met a woman. She was so intelligent that during our long love affair, she did not let me know about my unwise illusions, until we signed the marriage bond. The ladies are good at keeping secrets, you know. She kept telling me that I was a man of no fault. And when the first month of our marriage was over, she found out a truckload of faults in me. While tearing a page from daily calendar, she would find out a fresh defect in me. Had I not been married, I would have never known how irresponsible, irregular, rude, immodest, and ignorant I was. These are the adjectives I have earned during the first month of my married spell.

As a banker, at that time, I knew the value of savings. I professed the importance of the same among the others, too. But after my marriage, the savings is the last thing I can imagine about. Till today I can’t understand that the simple tasks like cooking for two, washing the floor once in a week, and using a washing machine twice in a week could be so costly. Had I done these tasks myself, I would have been at least a millionaire today.

For those of you who still are unmarried, I would tell one hard fact that all the women are supposed to be more or less sharp minded. But sad it is to reveal that my wife is painfully sharp. Sometimes she uses her mind power in taking revenge on me, too. After all a woman’s wisdom is to use it against her husband; otherwise what is the use of her being so intelligent? So in my fare lady’s case, especially when we go to functions and parties, she sometimes wears her wedding ring in a wrong finger. And she keeps that finger so accessible to everyone’s eyes that one has to try hard not to look at it. When someone notices it, she feels enormously good. On any one’s asking that why she has her ring in a wrong finger, she would say that, “Yes, I wear it in wrong finger because I have married a wrong man.”  And then all of a sudden the people’s eyes would turn on the wrong man.

I was married before thirty-three years. My marriage and myself are still alive, unbroken. And I know my wife is happy with her marriage with me; she has so many reasons to be happy. But, irrespective of all the cyclones and tornados I have faced in my life, I still love my wife as I loved her before our marriage. I have a special reason to love her. I believe that real happiness is not in looking at your spouse’s deficiencies; the happiness resides in how you deal with your spouse’s deficiencies.  And my wife has dealt dutifully.