“I accepted very late that I had become a husband, it took me a long time. Nearly 10–15 years to realise that she is my wife. Before that, she was just a woman who had my children, cooked for me, and took care of the house. I had no feelings beyond that.” (Source)
Renowned actor,
singer, and lyricist Piyush Mishra said this in an interview with journalist Shubhankar
Mishra.
The internet
responded with the kind of melancholy admiration reserved for tragic lovers.
Here was a man still faithful to his great love after all these years. But I
could not stop thinking about his wife.
Imagine being
married to someone for decades, performing all the duties expected of a wife –
emotional, physical, mental, and social. Taking care of his parents, family
(extended and immediate), bearing kids and tending to them as they grow,
managing the house, cooking, cleaning, remembering every single birthday,
anniversary, important occasion, and being there. Only to learn that all this
while your husband never loved you.
What does it feel like to spend your life beside someone who speaks of you like an arrangement life made on his behalf?
Indian cinema
has always made room for male yearning and depicted it through the lost lover,
the unfinished romance, or even as the woman who got away. Entire films are
built around men mourning loves interrupted by Partition, family pressure,
caste, timing, and duty. Their sadness is framed poetically, almost reverently. The
wife, meanwhile, stands quietly at the edge of the frame. The camera knows
exactly where to look. It follows the man grieving the love he lost, while the
wife who spends decades living beside that grief is left just outside the
frame.
I thought about
this while watching the recent Imtiaz Ali film, Main Vaapas Aaunga, where an
old man, nearing death, still aches for the woman he lost decades ago during
Partition. The film treats this longing as beautiful, eternal, almost sacred.
His emotional distance from everyone around him becomes evidence of how deeply
he once loved. His family remembers this man as someone who talked less, was
never emotionally available, and was rarely warm in his interactions.
But somewhere in
that house is also a wife. A woman who perhaps spent forty years trying to
speak to a man already in conversation with a memory. A woman who bore his
children and held his house together with love. Cinema rarely asks us to
imagine her loneliness.
I often wonder what happens to the wife in such stories? She lives decades beside someone
emotionally elsewhere. Cinema rarely imagines her loneliness because the camera
remains loyal to male yearning. The audience is invited to interpret his
silence as poetic. And perhaps for the wife, it was simply absence. The tragedy
belongs entirely to him. His silence becomes depth. His emotional distance
becomes evidence of a love so profound that it survives decades. The wife,
meanwhile, is expected to understand his absence without ever becoming the
subject of the story herself.
In South Asia,
women are usually told, “Men talk less. They are not expressive. They just want
to be taken care of. Don’t expect more!” It is this messaging that leads to
women being okay with an emotionally absent partner all through their marriage.
Indian women are often taught that being
chosen for marriage is not the same as being loved, and cinema sometimes
reinforces this with alarming casualness. Perhaps that is why these stories
feel so familiar. They mirror an idea many women have heard all their lives:
men are simply less expressive. Don't expect tenderness. Don't ask for
emotional intimacy. Love him through his silence.
Women are taught
it is their duty to take care of their marital home. The society at large has
always ignored the wife. She cannot have desires, demands, or dreams. She cannot
have mood swings, health issues, or opinions. If she does, she knows she will be replaced.
So, is it even right to complain when cinema also ignores the wife?
Time and again, it hurts to see how cinema remembers the woman a man could not have. Rarely the woman who had to live beside that memory for decades.
Rocky Rani ki
Prem Kahani (2024) was a roaring hit and went on to win the National Award for
wholesome family entertainment. In the movie, grandson Ranveer Singh sets out
to find the long-lost love (Shabana Azmi) of his grandfather (Dharmendra), who
is nearing his death. Unlike Imtiaz’s film, they do meet and share their feelings,
including a kiss in front of their whole families, including Dharmendra’s
screen-wife, Jaya Bachchan.
In the movie, this
kiss is framed as liberation, unfinished love finally fulfilled. Audiences
applauded because old-age romance is rare onscreen. What fascinated me wasn't
the kiss itself. It was how instinctively we knew whom to root for. The film
had already taught us where our sympathy belonged. But the scene depends on
another woman’s humiliation becoming narratively irrelevant. The wife is very
much alive in this case, again unlike Imtiaz’s film. And she gets to witness
her husband having love, affection, kindness, and respect for another woman
in her own house.
Would audiences respond similarly if an elderly married woman rekindled romance with an old lover while her husband watched?
Even our
historical romances are built on the same emotional architecture. In Bajirao
Mastani (2015), Bajirao’s love for Mastani is portrayed as passionate, destined, and epic enough to challenge empires and social norms. Audiences continue to
celebrate them as one of Indian cinema’s greatest love stories. But somewhere
within all that grandeur is also Kashibai, the wife who had known Bajirao since
childhood, stood beside him through the making of his legacy, and was expected
to endure his betrayal with dignity. The film allows her pain, but not the same
romantic devotion it reserves for Bajirao and Mastani. We remember Bajirao and
Mastani as lovers separated by history. We rarely remember Kashibai as the
woman expected to continue loving a man whose heart had found another home.
A wife starts by
taking care of the house, turning it into a home, learning his favourite
dishes, participating in rituals, fasting for his long life, remembering every
birthday and every relative. Then come the children, sleepless nights, school
fees, medicines, groceries, ageing parents, and endless responsibilities that
quietly become hers. And yet, a woman is often alone even within marriage and a
house full of people. The othering of a woman within her marital home is so
deeply normalized that it rarely even registers as loneliness.
*-*-*
I have watched a woman’s loneliness closely. I have seen her cry herself to sleep, where she did not even know the reason behind her tears. I have spent years wondering about the women standing just outside the frame of great love stories. I have witnessed men being capable of love when they want to. I have seen the lengths they can go to when they are in love.
I think so often about the women in the background of love stories and wonder, what if they actually were loved for who they were? Would it change our stories as women?