When he says he had been a witness to a courtship that ought to have faded before I was born, does he mean he was thinking if a child was born, there will no longer be love between spouses? Can you simplify or paraphrase it, please?
I didn’t know which was worse—the idea of my father’s remarrying for love or of his actively seeking out a stranger for companionship. My parents had had an arranged marriage, but there was a touch of romance about it, too, my father seeing my mother for the first time at a wedding and being so attracted that he had asked, the following week, for her hand. They had always been affectionate with each other, but it wasn’t until her illness that he seemed fully, recklessly, to fall in love with her, so that I was witness to a courtship that ought to have faded before I was born. He doted on her then, arriving home at our Bombay flat with flowers, lingering in bed with her in the mornings, going in late to work, wanting to be alone with her to the point where I, a teenager, felt in the way. “I thought,” he continued, “since your bedroom is a good size, of putting the girls together there. Would you mind terribly staying in the guest room when you visit, Kaushik? Most of your things are with you now anyway. It is just a matter of where to sleep. But please tell me if you mind.” He seemed more concerned about my reaction to a new room than the fact that I had just acquired a new family.