A recent incident left me wondering about the unfortunate reality of domestic violence in marriages. A complete stranger shared their tale with me and I was left with little to say or do. I have been tossing in my mind since, whether there was another way to react. Here is the full story.
It so happened that I was at the New Delhi airport’s international terminal, waiting to receive family, whose flight was delayed. As a result I spent plenty time hanging around at the arrivals gate, making observations and mental notes about various passengers as they came out.
I vaguely observed a middle-aged Indian lady exit and eventually come and stand close to me. She was dressed in the casual western clothes of someone who is an NRI, and had a kind but somewhat lost expression on her face. She carried a trolley piled with her suitcases, and after standing next to me for a couple of minutes, diffidently said hello.
I smiled and said hi, and she proceeded to tell me that she had just arrived from London and needed to get in touch with her aunt. Her phone was not getting a network and the aunt had apparently, mistakenly reached elsewhere to receive her. She asked me if it might be possible for me to allow her to make a call from my phone. Since I have had the experience of being briefly stranded at an international airport for exactly this reason, I felt particularly sympathetic towards her. Not sure why she thought it might be a good idea to approach me, but it certainly was a good call.
Over the phone she asked her aunt to call me on my number in case there was any more confusion, which of course meant that she hung around with me till such time that her relative arrived. After telling me about how she had gone to live in London with her husband when she was young, she quickly told me the real reason she was visiting Delhi: to work through her impending divorce with her husband. After having been happily married for what seemed like a couple of decades, he apparently got involved with a young woman and had now decided to marry her and seek divorce from his first wife. Apparently he was refusing to grant her any assets in either London or in India, for which she had to fight. In the process, he had also started becoming physically violent in the recent past. At this point she proceeded to pull out the pictures stored on her phone, which showed some serious injuries to her face and torso after being beaten up.
Even though I felt very bad for her, the wiser side of me held back. In the recent years, I have realised that you can’t blindly trust anyone and marriage, of all relationships, is such a touchy issue. Even if the person in a bad marriage talks about it, it is never a good idea to tell them that their marriage is in fact, bad or give any helpful suggestions. I am not sure what emotional dynamics work here, but that is just experience.
So I expressed sympathy, but not as wholeheartedly as I instinctively felt like doing. Also, I did not offer any support, as I would have earlier. While the rational side of me thinks it was the only right thing to do, I can’t stop wondering if I did in fact do the right thing. What if this individual was truly in dire straits and needed help from anyone could hear them out? And I happened to be that person.
So this is what I ask of you as the reader: What would your response have been? What else could have been said to assuage someone in real pain? And is there something that can still be done?...
It so happened that I was at the New Delhi airport’s international terminal, waiting to receive family, whose flight was delayed. As a result I spent plenty time hanging around at the arrivals gate, making observations and mental notes about various passengers as they came out.
I vaguely observed a middle-aged Indian lady exit and eventually come and stand close to me. She was dressed in the casual western clothes of someone who is an NRI, and had a kind but somewhat lost expression on her face. She carried a trolley piled with her suitcases, and after standing next to me for a couple of minutes, diffidently said hello.
I smiled and said hi, and she proceeded to tell me that she had just arrived from London and needed to get in touch with her aunt. Her phone was not getting a network and the aunt had apparently, mistakenly reached elsewhere to receive her. She asked me if it might be possible for me to allow her to make a call from my phone. Since I have had the experience of being briefly stranded at an international airport for exactly this reason, I felt particularly sympathetic towards her. Not sure why she thought it might be a good idea to approach me, but it certainly was a good call.
Over the phone she asked her aunt to call me on my number in case there was any more confusion, which of course meant that she hung around with me till such time that her relative arrived. After telling me about how she had gone to live in London with her husband when she was young, she quickly told me the real reason she was visiting Delhi: to work through her impending divorce with her husband. After having been happily married for what seemed like a couple of decades, he apparently got involved with a young woman and had now decided to marry her and seek divorce from his first wife. Apparently he was refusing to grant her any assets in either London or in India, for which she had to fight. In the process, he had also started becoming physically violent in the recent past. At this point she proceeded to pull out the pictures stored on her phone, which showed some serious injuries to her face and torso after being beaten up.
Even though I felt very bad for her, the wiser side of me held back. In the recent years, I have realised that you can’t blindly trust anyone and marriage, of all relationships, is such a touchy issue. Even if the person in a bad marriage talks about it, it is never a good idea to tell them that their marriage is in fact, bad or give any helpful suggestions. I am not sure what emotional dynamics work here, but that is just experience.
So I expressed sympathy, but not as wholeheartedly as I instinctively felt like doing. Also, I did not offer any support, as I would have earlier. While the rational side of me thinks it was the only right thing to do, I can’t stop wondering if I did in fact do the right thing. What if this individual was truly in dire straits and needed help from anyone could hear them out? And I happened to be that person.
So this is what I ask of you as the reader: What would your response have been? What else could have been said to assuage someone in real pain? And is there something that can still be done?...
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