“And they lived happily ever after.” Nice to hear. It signifies that all is right at the end, that the rest of their lives are destined to be full and contented. But what happens after that? When the euphoria has ended, and you suddenly find yourself with the prospect of living the rest of your life with the person you gave your heart to? I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t an intimidating thought. When I see all these couples walking around, holding hands, or getting close and intimate with each other, one thought would eventually enter my mind, sooner or later: “How long would that last?” If I had someone with me, how long would I have the good fortune to be with her? How long will we be with each other, before we go on separately with our lives, whatever the reason may be?

I suddenly found myself being a driver two days ago, taking my mum to see yet another relative who is related to us through some vague, complicated manner. He was admitted in IJN, and apparently he had been there for about a month before we found out about it. So, after negotiating through lunch-hour Saturday traffic, en route to Jalan Masjid India for the first in a series of long, drawn-out Deepavali shopping sessions, we found overselves in his room on the 5th floor of IJN.

The mood in the room was surprisingly relaxed, not at all what I was expecting. I usually thought that it would be gloomy and depressing and serious, with everybody saying very little and answerind well-meaning questions in short, curt responses. But I entered the room to the sound of laughter, as my mum managed to make a joke with just a sentence, which I forgot a while later. The uncle (whose name I later found out to be Sugumaran), was sitting in a comfy chair, and his wife was sitting on the bed, looking weary but still managing to laugh heartily. I only have a vague memory of seeing him before, but he seems to recognize me instantly, and proceeded to ask me questions about my brother and my father, what I was currently doing, and things of that sort.

Suffice to say it was not at all what I expected, seeing that he just had a heart bypass surgery the day before, and was not able to walk for two weeks preceeding that. I cannot seem to imagine how it must have been for his wife, all those nights sitting by his bed, watching him sleep, praying that the operation would go smoothly. “Yah, we could have lost him, you know? Just like that,” she said, and dismissed that notion with a laugh, while she sat on the hospital bed, wiping her glasses with the end of her saree. But I could see that she was contemplating the magnitude of what she just said.

How do you go on? The prospect of continuing to live your life when the one you love, is gone. The one who’s stayed beside you for so long, the one who slept beside you night after night, year after year, the one who knows you oh so well, the one who is your confidant. Gone for ever. All of a sudden, there’s this gaping void, this hole that cannot be filled. A pain that aches, when you go to sleep only to wake up the next morning, turning around to greet your loved one and you see the unruffled sheets, the clean, undisturbed pillow. Of course, I wouldn’t know. And I pray that I would never have to find out. That I would always wake up, day after day, to see the face of my love, to cuddle up to her, to stroke her cheek, to kiss her lips, to whisper sweet nothings to her.

To say to her, “I love you.”

I could see that bond between them. That love in their eyes. When he started shifting in his seat because of the pain, without a word, she took a pillow and gently placed it on his back to give some comfort. It has come into such an equilibrium, the relationship that they have, that no words are necessary to convey their emotions to one another.

Ever after, indeed.