She stopped for a while as though in disbelief, over what she had said.
“As if to protect their children from developing the poor cousin complex,” she continued in dejection, “my parents built a cocoon of moral superiority around us. Now I realize with hindsight that my father wanted his children to score for him in the game of one-upmanship with his brothers that he had lost by a mile. My mother too felt the same way, vis-à-vis her sisters-in law. As my siblings and I came of age, they made us aware of the status gulf that separated our cousins and us. Besides, our parents were wont to pinpoint to us the nuances of our grandmother’s differential treatment of them. How our young hearts used to boil with ambition to redress that parental lacking! Why, we used to assure our parents that we would make it bigger than our cousins one day. Well, that enabled them to derive a peculiar satisfaction, and that used to satisfy me and my siblings no end. Maybe that would've insensibly bound me to lift the stock of our flock subconsciously that is. That could've been the beginning of my undoing.”
“But as the dictates of life differ from the desires of man,” she continued with a sense of resignation after a long pause that seemed like eternity to Dr. Gupta, “and since ambitions are better realized by the well-heeled, we had to do with clerical education while our uncles’ largess to the respective institutions, enabled our cousins pursue professional courses. Ordained by fate though we became the weak links of the grand family chain, our collective bitterness only got steely by the day. Yet there was a saving grace for the hurt family pride, and that was the perceived beauty of my sister and me. It has ever been the only joy of my parents. But, as I crossed nineteen, the thought of dowry seemed to dampen their spirits all at once.”
“When Gautam proposed to me,” she said excitedly recalling their nascent romance, “our family jumped for joy. That he was handsome only added value to his being an engineer. All of us perceived the alliance as nothing but an accretion to our family pride. Oh, what a day it was, as everyone says to this day! But Gautam and I had a measure of it only through our wedding album. Well, we didn’t have eyes for any but for each other then.”
At that, she broke down.
“As I was in the seventh heaven,” she began at length, “Gautam showed me visions of far away galaxies. And, finding him burn with ambition to reach the zenith, I goaded him to get there. Why, didn’t I have my own poor cousin burden to shed there? For a start it was smooth sailing and then it seemed as if we were scaling the heights only to slip down the slope. Maybe, we grew too big for our shoes or we might have left our business flanks unguarded. Then came the moment of reckoning: to barter my chastity or embrace bankruptcy. Was it a choice any way! Oh, how I was averse to have anything to do with that shameful proposition. But then, how paranoid I had been to see my son’s cousins become his poor cousins! So, driven by my over eagerness to score for my family, I scored a self goal and that was the beginning of our fall, mine as well as Gautam’s. And from then on, severally as well as collectively, by degrees, we sank into the depths of depravity.”