Ranjini ... A Summer Story!

Ranjini ... A Summer Story!

Ranjini with her arms burdened with monthly groceries rang the doorbell of her flat.

The maidservant opened the door and took pity on her mistress. She relieved her of her heavy and cumbersome bags.

Ranjini was exhausted, her plain cotton sari stuck to her slender form making her look thinner and more angular than she actually was. She puffed and sat down on her threadbare armchair, fanning herself with her pallu. Nothing seemed to cool her. Not even the two ceiling fans that were whirring away full speed. She asked for a glass of water and the maidservant ambled away humming a latest Hindi film song as if she had all the time in the world.

Her every movement seemed exaggerated to Ranjini. She had woken up in the morning with a splitting headache and the heat outside nor the two paracetamol tablets helped to ease her pain. She was tense, nervous and very irritable. She shouted at the maidservant who was really taking her time. She made a moue behind her mistress” back and handed her a tumbler of chilled water. Ranjini gulped it down thirstily and placed the tumbler with a bang on the coffee table. She relished her action. She could not have done it in the presence of her husband or her children. Her husband would have made some cutting remark in front of the children and they would have sniggered openly. Everybody was against her, even her own children.

Sometimes she doubted whether at all they were her children. It was true that she had borne them; both of them had been difficult pregnancies with morning sickness lasting till the evening. It was not restricted to the first trimester but carried on for all of forty weeks. She had lost authority on them from the time that they were born. Her in-laws had taken over surely and swiftly dictating the norms of motherhood to her and showering their only son with compliments for contributing to the birth of his bonny sons. Ranjini had looked on helplessly and that emotion was etched on her face ever since. Being an orphan did not help, retrospection did not help, wallowing sin self-pity did.

She was stripped of everything, love, happiness, understanding, dignity — the list was endless. Every time she thought she could not be hurt anymore, the worse it got. The tightening of her chest, her eyes burning with unshed tears were familiar symptoms. She tried not to cry in front of her family for they ridiculed her calling her a sentimental old fool wallowing in self-pity. May be she was but that did not stop her from hurting. Nothing ever would.

She was financially enslaved to her husband for her personal necessities. She did not have one paisa that was truly hers. Everything was his — his house, his car, his bank account and his children. She once contemplated on taking a job as a Montessori teacher in the neighbourhood kindergarten and she was foolish enough to voice her opinion to her husband. His answer had been an emphatic “no” and the dismissal of the daily bai who washed the dishes, clothes and ran errands.

She was stuck in a vicious, venomous circle of husband, sons and family. In trying to keep all these relations intact, she had lost herself somewhere. She had decided to remain lost in order to find and restore the relationships she considered of paramount importance — her family. She had also known that it was futile.

She was too strong to contemplate suicide and death was cruel. It would come to her in her old age and she would die a grandmother surrounded by daughters-in-law, uncaring, callous sons who would carp about the money spent on her required pacemaker. They would have even sold the pacemaker after her death instead of donating it to charity. There would be a social farce, an elaborate cremation ceremony and mourning, all the necessary pujas and feeding the entire neighbourhood with a five course meal. Every ritual would be observed so that Ranjini would never haunt her sons or their families. But Ranjini never would, she would be free at last. She had been dead all her life and she would start living after her death.

Ranjini wiped the beads of perspiration from her forehead with her pallu and gave a wry grin. She had engaged in this morbid fantasy before and it was fast becoming her favourite pastime. It would be a long wait but it would definitely be worthwhile.