“Doctor saab, what has my life come to now?” she said as she sighed. “Oh, to save my son’s life, I must kiss and tell in court! Can it ever get more ironical than that for any woman?”
“I understand,” he said holding her hands as though guiding her on the way to her destiny, “what a Hobson’s choice it is, and it is the sadness of your life now.”
“I don’t think you would ever get the full picture,” she said, seized by an urge to be understood by him, “till I show you the other side of my demented mind.”
“How I wish to be of help,” as he said, he attuned himself to hear her.
‘Oh, why did it never occur to me before?’ she began contemplatively. ‘Thanks to you, now I realize that I myself was a victim of parental paranoia. As fate would have it, I was the first-born besides being the closest to my parents. We are five siblings—three brothers and two sisters. When I was born, my father, the youngest amongst his six brothers, was a petty clerk at the municipal office in Guntur. But all his brothers happened to be high ranking government officials. My father never failed to remind us that his father had retired by the time he had completed his schooling, and that came in the way of his higher education. But for that, he felt, like his brothers, he too would have made it good in life. What's worse, as none of his siblings took up his cause; he came to see them as the source of his deprivation! Oh how he came to grudge them all his life. God knows the truth; my grandfather was wont to maintain that my father was no good at studies.”
“Whatever,” she paused for a while, as though to get a correct picture in hindsight, “it forced him to settle for a clerk’s post and remain in the ancestral home. Maybe, he needed my grandfather’s pension to augment his own salary to support the family. Of course, all my uncles left Guntur and were on their own. But my mother was unable to reconcile to the facts of my father’s life that denied her a nucleus family of her own. Thus, feeling trapped in the joint family that entailed her taking care of her aged in-laws, and envying the carefree life of her sisters-in-law, my mother came to grouse the crumbs of life that fate had dished out for us all. Well, her sense of frustration helped further my father’s own sense of deprivation. All that insensibly cemented their joint sense of helplessness. Whenever my uncles came with their families to see our grandparents, my parents used to feel slighted for they believed that the visits were just for a show off. Now I realize to what lengths the state of imagined deprivation could take one.”