Shreya Sen-Handley | Waiting for ‘sorry’? Why not get even?
When seventies superstar Ryan O’ Neal died last year, I rewatched some of his old films and even found one I hadn’t seen, the touching Oscar-winning Paper Moon. Revisiting Love Story, however, left me disaffected. I was still dazzled by O’Neal’s beauty, but that famous line from the film — “love means never having to say you’re sorry” — annoyed the *&%$outta me. It's this sort of entrenched, unrealistic nonsense that has made modern romantic love unsustainable.
Oh, it’s true that love shouldn’t involve compulsion of any kind, except to be good to each other, because if you aren’t doing that, you ain’t in lurrve. But NEVER having to say you’re sorry is also the opposite of love — epitomising selfishness, inflexibility, and the inability to see your warts, you have eyes only for you.
Besides, although love shouldn’t mean having to say you’re sorry, it’s all about being prepared to do so, no? Long-term love is a diurnal struggle between your altruism and ego. Perpetually plotting to keep both yourself and your significant other happy, can sometimes involve standing your ground (but with gentle, good humour), mostly meeting halfway, and sometimes ceding your turf totally, paving the way with generous deployments of ‘sorries’ (and choccies too, pretty please).
Yet, as Elton John bewailed, “sorry seems to be the hardest word” in any relationship, and not just in love. Like pulling teeth with most people, when you do get a ‘sorry’ out of ‘em, how often is it worth the heartache of its pursuit?
Tripping off the tongues of politicians caught red-handed, it never deters them from repeating their misdeeds, because their contrition meant nothing and cost them nothing in the first place. Nor is it ever a straightforward apology, with words spun to dissemble and obfuscate, as with Tony Blair’s Iraq-invasion regret, “I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong, becausethough Saddam had used chemical weapons extensively…the program in the form we thought it was didn’t exist in the way we thought.” Huh??
But, trust me, even a non-apology like that is an achievement on your part if you’ve wrung it out of the British, whose genocidal plunder (aka colonialism) of countries like ours, is yet to be apologized for, or even properly acknowledged! Blair’s successor David Cameron’s 2013 India visit held forth the promise of an apology, but none was made, of course.
This is entirely consistent with the British “values” they bang on about, with “I’m sorry you feel we’ve done/not done X, Y or Z” the usual response to any attempt to make them do as they ought, or just own up. Snidely yet incontrovertibly pinning the blame for their wrongdoing onyour supposedvague and woolly ‘feelings’, but couched in politesse! And if your name’s “funny”, e.g. Shreya, this outright rejection of your experience becomes routine.
On the other hand, If your wrangle is with Indian organisations, especially the lethargic, lumbering bureaucracy, you won’t even get a false apology, only months, maybe years, of silence, and some pompous statement about their “rules” at the end of it, concocted to benefit only themselves and meaning absolutely nothing.
Average Jais like you and I are, thus, always caught between a c…rock, rock, I meant rock, and a crushingly hard place. Is an apology worth getting then if they’re almost always insincere, undoing any healing? Empty words cannot redress wrongs, restore faith in human nature, or provide closure, and while reparations would be better, the tangible kind especially, what chance do we have of extracting cash, if we can’t coax out a “sorry”? Squeezing milk from stone idols sounds more feasible than dosh from tightwads, and chances are, money wouldn’t fix your emotional scars.
Well, how ‘bout revenge? Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say, but how cold does it have to be to seriously cool our burn? How much time and distance must we put between ourselves and the injustice, before we can dish out a satisfying comeuppance? I find, however, that this cooling-off period extinguishes the fire to get even.
The Count of Monte Cristo was our text in Class VI, and it provided grist for the mill of my plans of getting even with my new Kolkata classmates, who derisively called me E.T., for my huge eyes, HUGER inability to fit, and legacy-of-years-abroad American accent (but wait, did E.T. have an accent??), poking malicious fun at me at every opportunity. Yet, somewhere along the way they morphed into friends, though admittedly the kind you keep at arm’s length, and I completely forgot about vengeance. Could that be the point of persuading people to wait before they attempt to exact revenge? Ahhhhhh!
If you think about it, revenge is utterly pointless because it could only impact a friend, and one doesn’t usually want to harm a buddy. If you aren’t planning anything elaborate or grisly (viz. hard work, y’know, and ILLEGAL),and it’s words you want to wound with, then there’s nothing you could say to someone who doesn’t care about you that would hurt them in the slightest.
Ultimately, it was, in fact, Dumas who inspired me, and I learnt to exact revenge the best way there is: literary! Let those who’ve wronged you meet their comeuppance in the worlds you wreak with your pen. Make it as diabolical as you please; no-one gets hurt, you can’t be arrested, and your readers are supremely entertained! So, if you once called me E.T., and are now reading this — vengeance is mine, my friend!