(This has nothing to do with my life - don’t read into it)
Was it a beginning or a continuing journey? It’s hard to say. Whatever it was, the fairy tale must have begun very early. Just a few days old, eyes still opening and adjusting to the bright lights and faces; and ears getting accustomed to strange noises and voices, she was slowly furthering herself in a new zone. After familiarizing, she must have looked forward to spending time with her doting older brother, who while playing with her would narrate, very convincingly, the story of her birth. A story she attentively heard and kept in her strict custody.
According to him, she was delivered by Dr. Biswas’s gardener in a huge flower basket on August 9th, 1974. A fair, healthy and utterly gorgeous child, wrapped in a clean white towel, came packed in a brown basket filled with fresh green ferns, bright bougainvilleas, roses and wild daisies. She was carefully passed on from across the common, high wall between the two villas, to her brother, who always wished and prayed for a baby sister.
For many years she fiercely believed and owned the story and took pride and pleasure in sharing it with all. Some found it cute and others couldn’t care too much and when the story-telling didn’t stop when it should have, simply thought she was or could be crazy. When she finally learnt the truth through her science text books in school, she was understandably disturbed. To discover that in place of the lovely bright sunny day and hand-picked flowers, there was a tiny, dark room in the house, a mid-wife, a mother in painful labour for three long days, and a very messy and bloody delivery. To find that the long-drawn family feuds were almost peaking with stoic and cold silence at the time of her birth and that her father who was working in a hill town, far away from home was declared deceased by the local newspapers just before her arrival were her initial encounters of embarrassing realities.
Disappointed, she was ….but then not for too long. She absolutely adored the sentiments behind this effort by her brother and it also gave her a brilliant refuge for surviving the impossibly ‘pure and simple’ truth.
Soma has been, since then (or perhaps from much before), creating her own fables. Stupor has remained a constant in her flighty, seemingly super-conscious thoughts.
(to be contd.)
