She stopped as though she were at the crossroads of her life all again and turned remorseful.
“Besides, I wouldn’t have felt the need to compromise as I did in chasing the twin mirages of wealth and status,” she said regretfully. “And what a silly life I had led all these years! But, was I not a victim of the rat race into which my parents had pushed me insensibly? Though I won’t like to blame them, yet I wish they had had the wisdom not to bias their children. Had it been the case, I could have been my own person, with my fair share of faults. But by imposing their emotional overburden on me in particular, it seems they complicated my psyche that ultimately led me to my moral nadir. After having lived the best part of my life in pseudo satisfaction thus, I found myself at the cross-roads of confusion when the scandal blew up in my face.”
“Though I never applied my mind to it, I am sure the emotional quotient of my siblings could be no better than mine,” she resumed after a long pause. “I wonder how they are handling their lives! God forbid, should they have to face the stiffness of adversity, I am afraid they would all crack without a clue. Thanks to Gautam, at least, I am better off that way.”
She went into a prayer as though to appeal to God not to test her siblings.
“But for that thoughtless upbringing,” she resumed her analysis of her life, “I would have lived in mediocrity as a faceless practitioner of middle-class morality, all the while fantasizing life of high society. Maybe unwittingly, my parents readied me to be the glove on Gautam’s ambitious hand to grasp the expediency of life. It was another matter that we lost track of our life itself before we were lost to each other in the end. Maybe I would never know why I became loose for no conceivable reason. Honestly, had I suspected in the least that I was pushing my son into the vortex of crime by my wayward ways; I would have been more circumspect. Who knows, I myself would've got out of the cesspool of promiscuity. Well, that’s the regret with which I would've to live and die.”
“If not for my disorientation, there was no way I would’ve gone astray,” she said with an apparent regret. “Gautam was no mean a lover for all that. If not a victim of circumstances, I wouldn’t have ended up the way I did. Surely, I shouldn’t have. True, I am amorous but not amoral at all. Whatever I had undone myself, hurt my man and ruined my son. Now, I think it’s time I help my son at least to get a chance to undo his past.”