Mon Capitaine

Dear reader, allow me a moment of treacly gushing.

I met my dear husband Amith during a trip to India. He’s highly intelligent, he wants to travel the world and engage in humanitarian efforts, and that mutual passion was a driving force which drew us together. Like many Indian men I've encountered, he has a bit of a hard time expressing his feelings, but he’s really very compassionate. He's a natural leader as well, and everywhere we go, people seem to look up to him. As an added plus, he's also awfully handsome:

Amith and me standing in front of an Indian naval submarine.

(This is an old photo, but trust me, he's aged like fine wine.)

I first read "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" when I was a newlywed, and I must admit my first thought was, “Why did no one tell me Captain Nemo was sexy?” I wanted to know more about his backstory, which was left unexplained. A quick search lead revealed a follow-up Jules Verne had written titled, "The Mysterious Island."

It was not as good as many of his other books. I think Verne wanted to write a Robinson-Crusoe-type story while riding off the success of his magnum opus. Captain Nemo appears as a sort of deus ex machina at the tail-end of the book, info dumps his entire backstory in a couple of paragraphs, and then promptly dies of old age -- despite being a remarkably healthy fifty-year-old just a couple of years earlier. (Jules Verne himself acknowledged his chronological discrepancies in "The Mysterious Island's" footnotes.)

At least Captain Nemo's backstory was really interesting and explained his character. His real name was Prince Dakkar, son of the Rajah of Bundelkhand. He was a prodigy, and received an international education at institutions across Europe. At age thirty, he returned to India and married a noblewoman who supported his vision of seeing India free from British rule. Tragically, in the 1857 Sepoy mutiny, Dakkar lost his wife and their two small children. He and his most followers built his infamous submarine, "The Nautilus," and sought revenge on the British Navy.

It all made sense: the extreme lengths he went to maintain secrecy and anonymity, his hatred of an unspoken enemy, his aura of sadness, the dramatic flair, etc.

And then looking at my husband, I suddenly understood my fascination with Captain Nemo. I have exactly one type; and that's grumpy old Indian men. Personality Database categorizes Captain Nemo as INJT, which is also Amith's Myers–Briggs personality type. Upon re-reading "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," I could definitely see the parallels in Nemo and Amith in terms of their sarcasm, introversion, leadership qualities, among other things. I'm quite certain that if I met a gruesome and untimely demise, my dear husband would become a mad scientist, and I can think of nothing more romantic.