When the sun stops shiningPunam Khaira Sidhu
NO I did not know Sunanda Pushkar. But I admired the dignity and dexterity with which she handled the IPL fracas, and then the pictures of her wedding were just so beautiful. You just had to pause to look, because the fact that the two people were in love shone through every picture.
And that I can relate to, having had a taste of being irretrievably in love. Love is such a profound, uplifting, emotion but it can change a woman in indefinable ways breeding a dangerous dependence.
Strong, sensible women usually fall harder. My father, who knows me better than anyone else, always tells me that I will become 'whole' only when I get over the man I love. Sad but true because 23 years on, I know that like the Carpenters song, the sun stops shining, when he and I are at odds.
Why do I, a strong professional woman, allow myself to fall to pieces over a man? I have a professionally satisfying career, fabulous sons, great parents, supportive friends, creative skills, but the world is right only when he and I are right, and that sadly is the way the cookie crumbles.
And so too did Sunanda crumble. Here was a woman who had pulled herself up from a small town in Jammu, travelled to Dubai and Canada, while continuing to support her family and trying to make a life for her son and herself. The world is not kind to attractive single women and I'm sure she did not have an easy time. But she did her best and she had succeeded. And then she fell in love and threw caution and the life she had built to the wind to follow the man she loved.
When things went wrong, she crumbled, but there was more here. As a woman in love, I know that I would never hold back the man I love, if he wanted to move on, even if it killed me. And that is what one of Sunanda's tweets said. So this was not a woman scorned. This was a woman who was not loved enough — the way she wanted. And I believe that perhaps was what was destroying her. Perhaps she felt her trust had not been kept. That she had staked her reputation and goodwill and put herself out on a limb for the man she loved and who she thought loved her back. Disappointed, she once hit out at the man she loved. Before her death, the two had announced to the world that they were happily married.
So let's just raise a toast to a strong, beautiful woman, who was a great mother, a great daughter, a great wife and someone who could have been more if only she had had the chance and not fallen in love with an unsuitable boy. R.I.P. Sunanda, and chin up Shiv — your fabulous mother will always be watching over you.
