Coffee Time Slurps

#Perhaps You

Sujata could've stopped it all. She was the one who had, for the first time, witnessed Jitesh raising his hand on his wife. That one time, she could've held his hand in the air and remind him..... Remind him what? Her conscience questioned her. She was the one who'd heard Mitali sobbing in glooming nights in pain and in woe. Then, she could've asked her...... Asked her what? Yet again, her conscience chortled spitefully. She was the one who had seen her daughter in law slipping into depression gradually, her eyes losing their gleam and her face transforming into that of a typhoid patient. In spite of that, Asha elected to be silent and all these precursors slip away from her hands.

Asha leaned back in her chair and curled her palm around the steel tea cup. She ignored the sensation of hot tea and fortified her grip, rising to her feet. She left the bedroom and came out in the open veranda that opened the way for the backyard. On other days, it had been pretty noisy there with Mitali and her melodious singing that - only Asha knew - was her only passion would resonate in whole open area. When the men left home for work, Mitali would often sit in the veranda with a plate of rice or pulse in her hand or do her daily chores, humming any tone she liked. It looked so isolated to Asha today but she also observed that except her, none of the family member missed Mitali. Not even her own husband and it pushed Asha to reassess her upbringing. But, but what was the upbringing she gave to either of her children?

Or, was she allowed to give any?

And even if she was allowed, what would've she given to them?

Asha had always thought that her daughter in law was plainly star-crossed because - it had to be the truth - Mitali was the one who couldn't grow used to the way Jitesh lived his life which was not much different than that of his father and brother or the other men in house. It triggered in her brain why it had been so difficult for Mitali to find her feet in the life Jitesh lived, it is something that is taught to a woman when she becomes of understanding age that she is just a subordinate. But then, Asha force herself to recall that out of the entire woman in her acquaintance, Mitali was different. She had dreams, she had opinions, and she had an identity which others, including Asha, lacked. Her birth being happened in a backward village didn't discourage her from opening her thoughts to look at new vista and often raising that secretly hated 'What if'. It had often made Asha question herself. Mitali was a human before being a woman.

Asha crossed the veranda and came into the backyard where Mitali had grown plants of jasmine and a few other flowers. It was her routine to water them and then sitting next to them, fondling the newborn petals as babies. It was the place where she used to devotedly listen to the snippets Asha told her sometimes about Jitesh's childhood, his few habits and answer a few questions that Mitali raised. After many years, the girl layered beneath Asha's withering senility had found a companion in form of Mitali. She reminded Asha of her own adolescence which was very different than Mitali. Mitali was just eighteen when she came to the household being married to Jitesh, Asha's elder son. Asha had been sixteen when she got married and the responsibilities that suddenly fall on her shoulders somehow made her spirit hibernate. Getting such a cheerful, lively and brisk companion in form of Mitali, even Asha let her wimp conscience out sometimes.

Often when she would have discoursed with Mitali, she would find a part of her existence removing from her. The very base that built her identity in her mind got a bruise whenever she opened up to Mitali and Asha couldn't understand why she was always the one to get silent in the end. Asha began to unleash the human in her when she was with Mitali. It used to terrorize her seeing that she actually hadn't had an identity and somewhere, she got that stability whenever she heard the painful weeping of Mitali coming from her son's bedroom, certifying that her son was crumpling the human in Mitali. She would suppress the desire to go against with the whole idea of being woman whenever she saw the blue blotch on Mitali's skin. Asha was a wimp. Mitali was still a fighter.