Thursday, January 06, 2005
It wasn't just the ugliness of the whole scene, or the simple discomfort of seeing that uncivilised creature shouting hoarsely at his wife and making a public nuisance of himself; there was also the embarassment of being privy to the private lives of these two people, even if only for that fleeting moment.
The ugliness of that man's behaviour made me wonder whatever had possessed the foodstall auntie to marry him in the first place. Was it drink that had turned him into the thing he now is? Was it failure? Had there ever been love in the first place, or was it a marriage that had been built on convenience and petty things - and is love afterall a petty thing as well?
I watched the auntie's weary lined face as she bore his drunken ravings, a face weathered by the years and greased with her labour, and wondered if her passive resignation was a sign of whatever love still remained, or merely an expression of quiet despair.
Quite a few people around me getting attached, and other people getting heart-broken or still nursing festering wounds or fleeting hopes. But sometimes I wonder... what's the big deal with love anyway? It's just chemical reactions to secretions from the brain, and yet people die for it, live for it, are governed by it.
Some police who happened to be there for supper stepped in after a while when he started knocking things off the table. She didn't go forward to explain, but neither did she step forward to complain - in fact, she never once responded to him, and she never looked up from her work. As if he did not exist. I wonder if she denies his present existence to remember the man he was and the man she married.
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:: Photo by National Geographic Society Copyright © 2002 ::