Tennis partners

Happy marriages and families don’t make for interesting reading. Tolstoy, of course, pointed this out in the famous first sentence of Anna Karenina. (Though, after a high court judge took exception to the presence of War and Peace on the bookshelf of accused “urban naxal” Vernon Gonsalves, perhaps quoting Tolstoy is verboten in New India. Of course, as is also common in New India, the facts have proven elusive. The judge, it seems, was not objecting to Tolstoy, but another legally published, legally sold book. As if it makes his suspicion of the content of personal libraries any less ridiculous.)

Anyway, let’s start again.

Happy marriages and families don’t make for interesting reading. Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike. And it’s true that there seems little value in attempting to distinguish between or precisely describe degrees of smugness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about contentment of late, since my wife and I have bonded to a surprising degree over tennis lessons. I’ve played tennis most of my life and have developed a technically proficient, if practically useless, game. I hit one-handed topspin backhands with pace and flourish. My forehand is flashy. I can volley and have a sufficiently powerful first serve and spinny second. I also lack competitive drive, hate keeping score, and have the unhurried gait of a hippopotamus at afternoon tea. My wife has never played tennis before. She started taking lessons alongside our five-year-old several weeks ago at the neighbourhood courts. Our daughter’s attendance at these lessons has waxed and waned, but my wife now goes several times a week. We go together, doing drills off hand-feeds — harder and sweatier work than you might imagine. And while my wife doesn’t seem any more interested in watching professional tennis or chatting about the game, she is devoted to the hour or so we spend on court.

It’s become an unanticipated oasis in an otherwise typical marriage, necessarily dominated by domestic inanity, by talk of children, school pickups, working out who can do what chore based on the gaps in whose schedule. Deeply dull stuff. Tennis is an antidote, a frivolity. Married couples with very young children often struggle to find time together. In India, this is maybe less of a problem, with extended families living under one roof a commonplace and the easy availability, should you have the money, of domestic help. Though the numbers show that in urban areas average family sizes have shrunk. 

Whatever the statistics, in our case we have no relatives in Delhi and although we do have domestic help we try not to ask them to babysit at night after they’ve already been working for us all day.

Americans encourage couples to steal away for “date nights”, a saccharine, cutesy term for the odd dinner or movie alone without the kids. But such “dates” can feel forced, as if any bickering or standard spousal sarcasm would ruin an occasion far less significant than its window-dressing would suggest. The tennis somehow feels more natural, organic. We have an ostensible purpose — hitting better forehands and backhands — but mostly we’re enjoying being together, sharing a companionable chat during a water break; a rueful glance after a drill has left us doubled over, our breaths ragged, our middle-aged bodies screaming in protest; a moment free of all concern except the moment.

In long-term relationships, there comes a point where you communicate in shorthand. The big questions, you think, have been answered. You know, or think you do, what your partner’s values are, their principles, their worldview. Complacency is inevitable. We know our partners, inasmuch as it is possible to know anyone. Marriages break down when couples realise they didn’t know what they thought they did, when, suddenly, they wake up next to a person they no longer recognise. It takes attention and care to see your partner (and yourself) — through the scrim of age, and contempt nurtured in the soil of familiarity — as they are and not the person whom you’ve invented, a composite of nostalgia and wishful thinking.

Talking politics in New India is depressing, and we agree with each other anyway. Our cultural pursuits don’t intersect as often as they once did — we read different novels, watch different films, listen to different songs. Besides, who has the energy, the passion for those kinds of conversations, those jejune all-night sessions in which you set the world to rights? It’s not the same when you know you could be interrupted at any point by a baby who has thrown up his dinner. What tennis offers is an escape, a retreat from the world, a forgetting. And what about this world, at this time, is worth remembering?

Tolstoy once wrote: “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible... except by getting off his back.” This could serve, in midlife, as a description of one’s marriage, just as it could, say, a description of one’s country. I’m grateful my wife and I have discovered this temporary reprieve, a way to lighten the load. Maybe I’ll introduce her to five-a-side football next.