I by name am SWETA and my life
runs with failures and happiness. And please don’t expect any wild stuff: blatant sex, violence or running behind the
bank balances. I may be child of a failed marriage, a daughter of a refugee couple. Yes, it is fact that I’ve suffered
the most heinous crime: the rape. But I take weapons in my hands, fight back and rise to a chair of an event manager in my
company. Though my bosses hold a generous belief in my regard. The belief: had I not kept my thighs so tight and closed I
would have been on a more lucrative seat. But that doesn’t prevent me from being humorous, speaking satirically.
One warning: slapping the juniors at office is my casual sport.
I do not claim my language will lead you to create a pictorial relationship
with my words, exactly. Words are weak to value a culture, smell the soil. Only I do claim that by walking with me you will
hold your breath; such are the successive happenings in my not-so-open life.
I hated ‘men’ en masse, disregarded the marriage system; I was happy as a tortoise withdrawn in its shell—until
a man from grassland meets me.
AJAY is mad: mad with desire to uplift poor people, mad for unearthing his
links with a prestigious lady, and mad in caring for me and loving me. He believes a married life is ceremony of sharing,
and it provides us the sets of balanced people. Too much logical, isn’t it? On future of mankind he has assurances:
‘God hasn’t closed the office. Have faith’. For sex he says, ‘it is blessing of God: it helps our
survival. Sex without responsibility is lust, and I will not sleep with a woman without pledging my lifelong bond’.
He acts as he believes.
You just walk in my life and see that love is neither a flesh affair nor an accident. It grows like a flower plant,
stage-by-stage: the tilling, planting, watering and flowering. When I reach Ajay’s
village and his living-scripture-like grandma, I realize that lasting love is not an incidence. It is a process.
“My child, relationship is not a cake you can buy from a shop at the corner of your street. It develops with
time. It accumulates like water in a well.” Grandma says.
I face the worst time when some hired hooligans attack Ajay. Reason? Honesty is the best enemy. While Ajay is in hospital,
there enters his ex-lover, CHARU. Mad with pain. She has exited from his life-theatre for a noble pursuit: her self-set pilgrimage.
I befriend her, too.
But my first taste of fear leads me to imagine that Charu may surface again on waters, land on this side of the river,
and carry away Ajay on her raft with all the rose plants I have planted. She is good at carrying the things of past. But Charu
thinks on different wavelengths. She perceives a committed lover, a caring woman in me.
On my living with Ajay she tells me: “Sweta, Ajay’s love is a jewel. Preserve
it.”
