Two men

2014 - 103, 65, 62, 40 and 40! Wonder what these numbers are. The first goes without explanation. The other two are a riddle no one but me can solve. 103 is the age my father would have been today; 65 is Ranjan's - the husband - age today, 62+ some months is how old I am today and 40 and 40 are the number of years I have spent with the two men I love most. Papa and Ranjan share a birthday or almost: the former was born on August 15th and the later on August 14.

These two men undoubtedly made me who I am even if it took me long years to realise this and learn not only to accept it but to celebrate it as though they outwardly are as different as chalk and cheese, their heart and spirits are almost clones of each other. And today I realise that I have spent exactly the same amount of years with each of them with a few of them overlapping of course. Those would amount to 22 years! 

As I said these two men have a lot more in common than you may want to believe. First of all they both fell in love with me almost instantly. I took Ranjan a week to propose! And in spite of lots of ups and downs they never wavered no matter how many doors I banged or tears I shed, they waited unobtrusively for the brat to come to her senses. Papa or Tatu as I called him, made me from a crying lump of flesh to a caring and erudite human being. He patiently and lovingly moulded the raw material and taught me right from wrong as well as  the courage to walk the road less travelled. He let me make my mistakes and get hurt, sometimes deeply but was always there to wipe the tears, tender to the wounds and help me get up and run again. The day he left the world I think he, more than anyone else and most of all me knew that I was ready to jump without the parachute he had been.

But none of this would have been possible without another man who gave me the total freedom to  walk all the less travelled roads and also stood in the wings lest I fall, and fall I did. He simply picked me up without a single word of retribution or even counsel and set me on another course. If one moulded the raw material, the other allowed it to grow and bloom the way I wanted it to. And I would be unethical if I did not say that the road(s) I chose went against all the conventions and mores that we are meant to live by. He defended me like a knight in shining armour at every moment of my life. I must admit that I now realise that it must not have been easy for him but he never uttered a word. Just like Pa, I think he was and is proud of the person I am. It is now my turn to prove to him that he was right.

Today I want to tell both these incredible human beings that I love them and always will. May God bless them.

Happy birthday Ranjan and Ram.