Divorce, divorce, divorce

It’s not India’s longest running marriage by any means, but it has become India’s longest running marriage filing for divorce. The Parsi couple from Mumbai - the 74-year wife and her 80-year old husband, has asked to end their 40-year long union. They’ve already been living apart in two adjacent apartments, initially separated by a door that was eventually replaced by a brick wall. Unable to settle the disputes, they recently sought the court’s help to look at their bitter bickerings. The court, too, found it hard to decide and asked them both to take a reasonable approach, stop any further bitterness, and settle it between themselves.
That’s a tough one. At an age where most day-to-day disputes and bickerings should likely be a thing of the past, to have to worry about money and real estate matters is already a huge hassle. Worse yet, imagine the person you’re trying to fight that battle and the person stealing all your mental peace, is the person you lived a lifetime with. It’s a tough one for the couple, a tough one for their kids, and a tough one for the bystanders and outsiders and even the divorce courts.

It was a battle of courts in Michigan, USA last week, when that state’s appeals court threw out a lower court’s original ruling that had recognized the talaq - the Muslim divorce practice in India. The lower court had ruled on a case where the husband, an Indian Muslim living in Michigan, had divorced his wife of 8 years by traveling to India and uttering the words ‘divorce’ three times (talaq, talaq, talaq). The appeals court has now thrown that ruling out of the window, insisting equal protection and equal rights for the wife.

It’s an interesting question as to what the society and the government really owe to two married citizens on the brink of separation. Make the laws somewhat tougher so people won’t file divorce for minor reasons and disputes? Or make the laws simpler so people can separate and go about their lives as they wish? And does that same society and the government owe anything to the sons and daughters of that couple? People all over already practice living together and living apart as alternatives to legalized marriages and legalized divorces. Should it be mandatory for everyone to go through such a test bed before filing for marriages or divorces?