Reminiscence

What is your ideal life partner like?

In my mind's eye, I see again the yellow fields, vast into the horizon lighted by the yellow evening sun. The rice fields with ripening yellow grains ripple with the passing wind, like a gigantic piece of cloth touched by gentle giant hands.
My village snug on a hillock overlooking the valley, only had one road access, and we seldom had any visitors. It was a very traditional village, with the outside influence being our two door school.
Everyday when we go to school we would pass along the bund that kept in water for the rice plant, and we would get wet with morning dew.
It was an idyllic life, everyday was the same. Some days were different in that we children went to catch fish at the river and our parents stayed at home, pounding the grains to de-husk them. My best friend who I will call Bona, and I, always went together in those adventures.
She was a year older than me at 13 and she had beautiful long black hair that hung to her bum.
We always had so much fun together especially when we were on our own in the jungle collecting firewood.
One day we went collecting fallen branches of rubber tree for firewood, and we rested a while, looking towards the valley where the yellow rice field were.
We talked about the future and marriage and about our ideal man. I always thought I would marry this tall guy with dark curly hair and strong arms.
We laughed about it of course, as she said she would like to marry a foreigner and run away. The only foreigner we knew of course was our Priest and portraits on the wall of the British Monarch and her family.
I was amused of course,  until she turned sombre and said she might never be able to choose.
I knew immediately what she meant and I looked at her in horror. Marry any foreigners but that I almost shouted. We just went quiet after that. We were together a lot for many months afterwards but we never talked about it. There was always a heaviness in our hearts.
On her fourteenth birthday, she was engaged to be married to a man from the next village who was a widower with three children. Her parents thought he was the ideal man, being with properties of land and many buffaloes.
On the fifteenth birthday, she got married.
I was devastated, angry and disappointed with the whole culture and tradition thing.
I saw her once after her marriage, she did not look like a wife, she looked like the man's other children. Her eyes looked dead even when she smiled. She died several years later in her mid-twenties. They said it was a stroke, but I think it was of a lifelessness and broken heart.
I vowed to myself that I would never ever give in to that. Never. I ran away at the age of 15.
I have had relationships through the years, but I have yet to know about what my ideal life partner should be like.



*this is fiction but child and pre- arranged marriages were practised by my people until recently. Needless to say girls like Bona were victims of that norm.*