The decision to leave my well-paying job in Singapore wasn’t an easy one. I had built a life there for 10 years. I had friends, associates, a beautiful apartment on the 17th floor overlooking a manicured park. I was living the life I always aspired for.
Life took a sudden turn. My mother landed up in the hospital with dengue and my 81-year-old father kept doing the running around. I couldn’t come down because I had a deadline to meet for a very important international client. This shook me up. I suddenly felt that as their only daughter I was failing them.
I thought if I was so talented, and had become the VP of an international ad agency at 35, then I should be able to build a career in consulting sitting in Calcutta. I knew it would take time but I had my savings to fall back on. I planned for six months, bought my tickets, put in my resignation and called my parents to give the good news. I imagined they would be ecstatic.
That was the first time I realised I didn’t know them at all. My mother went mum and my father kept mumbling, “Are you sure? Are you sure?”
Any right-thinking person would have crawled back to the company and withdrawn the resignation and continued with life in comfortable Singapore. I was too much heart, my greatest weakness all my life. I thought they loved me too much to see my world crumbling. Little did I know then they were thinking that those Singapore dollars wouldn’t land in their bank account any more.
When I read in the newspapers about the dowry demands married women had to face, the torture and the mental torment, when a friend told me how her in-laws kept fleecing her husband, I thought I was happy being single. I didn’t know then a woman’s predicament was the same — single, married, educated, earning — she had to give her all to get ‘love’. Reality hit me hard.
In this home where I lived with my aging parents and ailing aunt, Sumita Mashi, there suddenly entered a spot of sunlight named Alvira. She was a seven-year-old sprightly girl, grappling with the divorce of her parents. Her father Anish was my school friend. Perhaps, he was the reason I never got married, although I tried in every way to turn my single status to married, about which I will come to later.
Alvira pranced into my parents’ room and plonked herself on to the ledge of ‘the’ window with a view. She easily squeezed her small frame into the extended ledge and looked up at the sky.
“Kites,” she screamed in excitement.
I could see a dozen in the sky. But I didn’t tell her I could fly one. She would have immediately asked me to go up to the terrace and fly kites with her. When I was her age, I spent hours on the terrace with my father flying kites, something girls weren’t too interested in doing. But I loved it. And I relished the camaraderie that I had with my father. The team spirit with me holding the latai and him flying the kite was something that men usually share with their boys. But he treated me as nothing less than one.
Whether it was a boon or a curse I didn’t know, being treated as a boy that is. But one thing I knew for sure was I did not want to go through the rigmarole of tying the string to the kite and teaching Alvira how to hold the latai and fly it in the sky myself. It was indeed an exhilarating feeling when the kite rode the winds, but the steps needed to get there felt too cumbersome for me at that moment.
I looked at the pink clip sitting on her short curls, and felt a surge of affection. I wore clips like that in my childhood too. My matching frocks had lace and frills but Alvira only wore tights and tees. It could be fun if I went out to buy some kites with her. I was trying to convince myself.
“Dida, (grandmother) see kites,” Alvira now tried to draw my mother’s attention.
She was hunched over the newspaper going through each and every line like she would have to be reading the news at the next bulletin. She didn’t like to be disturbed when she was at this very important job.
But she still looked up. She made the effort to look out of the window.
“Strange, I never see any kites,” she said.
I stopped myself from telling her, “For that you have to look out of the window.”
Alvira had a fondness for my parents. I would have loved it if it was reciprocated. My father tried sometimes by listening to her stories. He could have told her a few himself, but he never did. The smile that he gave her was genuine and that was my only solace.
My mother interacted with her when she had to get some information from her, which was usually about me. Then she was a wonderful sweet-talking grandmother. Otherwise, she was annoyed by her incessant prattle and tried to shut her up by handing over the phone to her, something that I despised.
When I came back to the room with my cup of coffee, I saw Alvira was now on my parents’ bed and my mother had handed her the phone and she was back to her newspaper.
“Why have you taken the mobile Alvira? I told you not to touch it.”
“Dida gave me. Please let me play a game.”
“No, even your father has scheduled a time when you can play on the mobile on weekends.”
“But today is a holiday.”
“Yes, true. But why don’t we draw and paint together, that will be more fun.”
“No, that’s not fun. I want to play on the mobile. See Dida gives me but you don’t.”
I looked at my mother. She was sitting with a satisfied smirk. Just the thing she knew her mobile would lead to.
I should have withdrawn, taken a thousand deep breaths, gone to my room and come back sweeter and calmer. But like always, I fell into the trap.
I tried to be firm and tried to show Alvira I was in control.
“Leave the mobile right now and come to this room.” I commanded.
Alvira started crying.
“You are so mean,” she sobbed.
My mother quickly interjected.
“Can’t you understand she doesn’t like you?”
Now I was dumbstruck. I never thought that way. I always felt what Alvira did was normal childish tantrum.
“You are her father’s mistress; how do you expect her to like you?”
Something snapped inside me.
I threw my cup of coffee and it immediately made its ugly mark on the wall. And the ceramic splinters were all over my feet.
I lunged at my mother and pulled her hair with all my might. She screamed in pain as her bun came undone.
“I will kill you! Today I will kill you!” My voice had gone hoarse.
After then everything was a haze.
I just remember Alvira crying loudly.
“Terrorist attack, terrorist attack,” she was screaming.
My father was trying to physically restrain me from a second round of assault.
I never knew that relationships could come to this. I never knew I would be violent with my mother one day — the mother who I thought was my world, the mother whom I thought I loved the most.
How did it come to this?
(To be continued)
Amrita Mukherjee is the author of the novel Exit Interview, short-story collection Museum of Memories and the crime non-fiction book The Secret Diary of a Criminal Lawyer. She blogs at amritaspeaks.in