"Surprise, shock, denial, then it was pure misery" - Prithi Narayanan on her first years of marriage with R Ashwin
Prithi Narayanan, Ravichandran Ashwin's wife, recently opened up about the tumultuous early years of their marriage due to the cricketer's public lifestyle and the lack of time for anything except the sport.
In an interaction with The Indian Express, she spoke about not getting a chance to be prepared for the kind of married life that lay ahead. A day after their wedding on 13 November 2011, they had to leave for Kolkata to play a Test against the West Indies. From there, the excessive media attention never left her.
"I don’t have a problem putting him first," Prithi said. "But I was very unsettled the first few years, not in the marriage but in how much this profession was taking away from what I could be building with him. First, it was surprise, then shock, then denial. Then it was pure misery. When we had children, I was sacrificing all our time. It took time to understand that if you want to succeed at the highest level, it always comes at a cost, either not spending time with his parents, or with his wife and children."
She added that it took her some time to holistically understand Ashwin's point-of-view and the negative impacts of him dedicating most his childhood and adolescence to the sport.
"This sport took over his life from the time he was seven and I took time to realise that sometimes they don’t know anything else. There is no fuel in the vehicle to put into another relationship or another presence in your life."
Prithi also talked about juggling between trying to retain her identity and understanding Ashwin's life from packing a kit-bag to net-sessions. She added that even though a sportsperson's life seems glamorous from the outside, it's mostly about plush hotels, and even there the family hardly spends any time together.
"We couldn't spot the photographer we hired for the wedding" - Prithi Narayanan on managing the media glare on Ashwin
Recalling her first taste of the kind of media attention she was dealing with, Prithi narrated an intriguing story from her wedding.
"I remember this instance when he was tying the wedding Thali (like a mangalsutra), all I could see was photographers around both of us. And we couldn’t spot the one we had hired for the wedding. It was the first taste of what it meant to be around a cricketer all the time," she said.
Ashwin will play his 100th Test on Thursday against England in Dharamshala, becoming only the 14th Indian to do so.