Quotidian Tales

With years of roles foisted upon her, she has forgotten what it is to be herself A certain Mrs Sen was staring hard at life. Four decades of scathing remarks and constant belittling had reduced her to an entity she could hardly recognise as being her true self. Irritable and lost, all that she could remember of her past was the warmth of her childhood home and the amassing accolades for her performance. Marriage had bestowed on her, activities and engagements, but untimely and unknowingly, halted the flowering of the self. Doing the chores and tweaking her life in the larger interest of the family soon became her habit and the only way to be. And then one day, life seemed to have passed by in a whiff. With her fledgelings flying out of the nest, age and ailments catching up on her, the gnawing presence of the spouse and every morning a span of twenty-four long hours hurled at her, she barely knew what to do. In those yesteryears, she never had the time (though she did...

The painful path of forgiving is what frees us from further pain. H e was the master. I was the slave. The stench suffocated me. My soul was decomposing. Till the day I decided to exercise my will. I took the leap of faith. I pried open the cage. Today I am divorced. With a child. The decision of changing my status, however, was anything but an easy one. And the life after was far from that. The day I crossed the threshold of my previous life, it had felt like cutting off my right hand. A hand that had gangrened, so I had to stop the spread. But that act meant much more than just the pain of severing. It meant learning to live without my dominant hand. And making the most with the other. I accepted my reality and devised two specific strategies to deal with it. First, I would never compare myself to an individual with two hands. The comparison itself was lame and lost. Second, I put my less dominant hand through a spartan schooling till it would emerge as the dominant one. ...