Newly Married – Lost In London

How would you feel if your husband left you stranded alone on the roads of a new city and you did not know your way about?

 Immediately after our wedding my husband and I settled in London, where he held an engineering job.

My better half said that the pre requisite for  life in London was knowing to drive a car well. He had lived in the UK before and had an international license. I knew to drive a car but my husband thought that I was not good enough to pass the driving test in England which had strict rules. It was decided that he would try to polish my driving skills.

Easier said than done.

The minute we got into the car, we became cat and mouse. My partner would get exasperated with me for everything. We were squabbling all the time.

One day, our fight accelerated and went out of control. In annoyance I blew up and said that I was not going to learn driving from him. I parked the car in the side of the road and got out, meaning to get into the passenger seat.

But my piqued husband moved to the driving seat, turned the ignition and within a second had driven off, leaving me stranded on the road.

I waited, thinking that he would come back to pick me up.

He did not.

I was new to London and did not know my way about. Those days we did not have a mobile phone.

The only thing that I remembered about the locality where I lived was, that there was public library close to my house. I walked to the library asking directions every few minutes. It was quite some distance away. As my purse was still in the car, I was penniless. I could not use any form of transport. Tired and angry, I entered the library and sat among the books for nearly four hours, too proud to walk to my house just a few blocks away.

When it was almost closing time at the library, I swallowed my pride and my tears and found my way home.

On ringing my doorbell, I expected to be met by a distressed and repentant husband or maybe even an angry one.

But the nonchalant man in the house showed no signs of having missed me or worried about me.

He let me into the house and went back to watching television.

I went in to prepare dinner.

It was much later when I had cooled down, I asked him if he had not got perturbed about my long absence.

I am not sure if I should be happy with his reply.

“You are a very confidant and intelligent woman. I knew that you would find your way home.”

PS: People who hear about this incident, chide him for abandoning me in an unknown place like this. Then my husband tells them that he did come looking for me after sometime and was just in time to see me enter the library. Knowing that I would be safe there, he had gone back home.

But I never bought that story even though he repeated it a hundred times.

   Story By : Sk –  Written By : Gulsum Basheer @talkalittledo