Chapter 1:
She sat, and she wept and she wept… As there was nothing else to say. Everything she cherished till this moment had been razed to the ground. She couldn’t complain about it, because she saw it she saw it happening. She saw them light up her life, just like that, and then in a minute there was nothing. Nothing left. It was weird, she was a fire sign and she kind of knew how fire worked. It would take hours to start it, but once it started. It was over before you knew it.
It was the winter. And everything was covered with snow. Including her life. It started four years ago, during the winter and it also ended in a winter. Maya was irritated with herself. With everything going awry around her, she still was focusing on the nitti-gritties and the redundant coincidences. Rob used to complain about it a lot.
“You know, that’s not what I am saying. This is the problem Maya. You don’t understand. I am talking about the overdue insurance money. Why the hell are you talking about where I put my shoes?”
“Robby, it started with the shoes. You need to maintain sometime kind of a system in the house, I can’t keep cleaning it all the time. Seriously, why me? Why always me? Why do I have to ask you to do such things, shouldn’t it come naturally?”
But it never did. Maya was, for all, held responsible for everything going wrong or right in the house or outside. Unfortunately, the rights were very few as compared and with all the efforts that she put, it was frustrating, she thought.
Maya and Robert met on the college campus. She used to be an ambitious journalist, with the tongue which was as volatile as her temper. People feared her on the campus. Many thought she was a professor. But Maya was just a self made 21 year old, who lost her father at a very young age. Whenever she saw her mother, run between jobs to make both ends meet, she would swore to herself that never she’ll let a man walk out on her. Even death would not do them apart. Maya’s early memories of her dad, remained of her lying gently on his father’s belly while he sung her to sleep. And her mother was usually in the kitchen. After her father’s death, her mother lost the interest to live. Usually, kids keep the light and fire alive, but for Maya that wasn’t true. She was not the hope for her mother. Her mother once said, after she caught Maya on phone with a guy. “Your dad was right, you are a good-for-nothing little slut. I go out of the house to work and this is what you do? What are you planning on to do, sleep around to earn some bucks, Is this why I am taking all this pain and doing a job and also the household chores? Why don’t you go out and find good fiesty customer you whore,” And she was thrown out for a night. While Maya lulled herself to sleep in that chilly November night without any warm clothes on herself, she thought, what wrong she had done. He was a classmate. Maya was barely 15 then.
As Maya reached puberty, she stopped holding grudge against her mother. She realised in her years of growing up that her mother was used to complaining…. Complaining about the morning tea, it had either too much of sugar or too less of sugar. The cloth covering the Sofa was too low, or the grass in the garden was cropped too short. Maya was used to it now. She told her diary once, “I think dad left because she complained she was seeing too much of him around…”
“It is time you decided something about your future Mattie, you have finished high school, and you need to chose a career,” Sarojini said one evening. It was sort of a ritual, every evening sitting together over a cup of tea. It was God’s last resort in making an effort to make peace between the mother and the daughter. The volatile mother and the very subtle volatile daughter. Maya and Sarojini were so similar that sometimes Maya blamed that to be the reason for not getting well with her mother.
“I want to do journalism,” said Maya with a definitive assertive tone. “Who the fuck will pay for that your dead father?”
“No need to bring the dead back, if I could live with you after his death, I will manage the course as well. You don’t have to worry about me.”
Tell me honestly, who is paying for this. Are you secretly married to an old fart, who is sucking you up and giving the little runt money for education? Tell me.”
There was an unusual silence in the room. Maya never knew what was silent, with her mother around all the time. But this was not the silence Maya craved for. Furious with her comments, she was shocked at her mother’s comments. Not new for her, but the blunt, blatant accusation was too much for a teenager to take in her stride.
“Do you even know me? Have you ever lovingly taken me in your arms after you pushed me out? I am a slut??? Do you know that I am 18 but no guy or girl will talk to me or even look at me because I have a fucked up family. A dead father and a I-have-the-mouth-of-dustbin mother?? The other day, Anand’s mother actually heard you while she was on her terrace and barred her son from talking to me. And he is not the only one Ma, the entire school is full of such Anands for me! Do you realise what you have done to me? I bet father is so much in peace, I would like to join him there,” that was the last thing she said before she stormed out of the house, in the chilly December of 2000. In her faded blue jeans and a white loose shirt that she wore that morning when she went to collect laundry and that was the last time she saw her mother.
Ten years later, Maya was sitting on her blue bedspread that she bought for the wedding, the corner of which was soaked with her tears which she had shed for the last 2 hours and thought about the incident. She for the first time, felt guilty of walking out on her mother. She was one with her now. How Sarojini would have felt after her husband walked out on her, it was not his choice everyone knew, but Maya still believes that Baba really wanted to go and that’s why he left them.
But hell no, things get worse and then they get better again.
