Freedom by Arunaraje Patil

Author:Arunaraje Patil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

8

FINDING ONESELF AGAIN

I cannot describe how it was when Gaagi was gone and she lay lifeless and people came and went. There was so much hustle and bustle and then they took her away. I had known that death was coming, had willed it to come and save her from another day of pain. That night someone gave me a Calmpose and I drifted into a deep sleep, like into the land of the dead where there is no pain, no pleasure.

It must have been around 7 in the morning when Vikas woke me up. All I wanted to do was cling to him and cry my heart out. I wanted to hear his soothing endearments which I had not heard in a while. But that was not to be. He held me firmly by the shoulder, looked into my confused, sleepy face and said, ‘I want a divorce.’ I thought I was having a nightmare and tried to shake it off, reaching for him. He still held me firmly and repeated that he wanted a divorce. He then left me sitting there trying to make sense of what I had just heard.

I knew it would come, sometime someday. Our marriage had been vulnerable in the past year and a half and my friend had made inroads into it pretty successfully. But I did not know how and when it would come. Though deep down I had hoped it wouldn’t come at all. In fact, I had tried to explain his involvement with my friend as a distraction he probably needed, away from the scene of seeing his daughter suffer.

This phase was the most difficult one of my life. Losing my daughter, husband and friend, almost all at the same time, in the span of twenty-four hours, had shaken the very foundations on which I stood.

To wake up to a new day every day was torture. The only anchor that kept me alive and connected with life was my little son, Hith, for whom I knew I had to live and for whom my heart used to cry. I had said ‘no’ to the divorce but had not imagined what it might be like living on sufferance.

Looking back, I remember that during Gaagi’s illness, maybe even before and after, there were other influences on Vikas. There were some well-known Bollywood personalities that Vikas was interacting with and they were shocked that he was a one-woman man and faithful in his marriage. They made him feel that he had missed something, not having played the field, and encouraged him to be adventurous. And he surely seemed to have taken the cue.

I think it was just four or five days after Gaagi had left us when we got a call that Parveen was not OK. Her secretary told us that she was behaving weirdly and we should look in on her. When we went over to her place, she looked frightened and scared. She had an attack of paranoia and told us

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