TWO SISTERS - PART 3

MATURE CONTENT | Reader Discretion Advised

SUREKHA

And to think Sara will have the guts to walk in in the morning in her horrendous black dress, with love bites all over her arms and neck, looking completely ravaged after a night of torrid lovemaking, while her father’s body grew cold by the minute. Her gall, to walk in unashamedly, when she had held on to the phone in her drunken stupor, delaying medical help to her father. Help that could have been the means of saving his life. And now pretending to be shocked and grieving. So grieving and so shocked that you become totally useless? Leaving all the arrangements to her, Surekha? No help at all? How very convenient! 

Surekha has had enough. Enough of her wayward sister and her rampant ways. She will not tolerate any more of this nonsense. Yes she! Surekha! In any case, she is making all the decisions in the house. She is looking at the will. At the property matters. She is responsible for closing down the business and completing unsettled transactions. She will not tolerate any more irresponsibility around the house, nor any more wastage and decadence. Her father had spoiled her sister completely.  

She will take this one year to settle her mother and all the numerous details that follow an untimely death, and then settle down with the man she has been seeing for the last four years. After all, she is twenty-eight. She was going to get married this year. Even though Sara had teased her incessantly. She had to be sure who she was marrying. Couldn’t jump into bed with the first man who pumped her adrenaline to a higher level after all.  

But now she has to wait for a year after her father’s death. Cannot celebrate the same year as you are grieving. Not like her totally obnoxious sister, who couldn’t even wait for three months to get married. Oh, how she had nothing but contempt for her sister. White liver. Turn tail, when it was time to shoulder responsibility after the death of that man who had pampered her so much. Who had fulfilled all her wishes at the drop of a syllable. In fact, the contempt slowly turned to detest, as the first year slowly faded into the second and then the third, and her sense of commitment to her various responsibilities kept her from marrying her man. 

He finally gave up on waiting and turned to another woman. Right under her nose. And settled down with her in a few months. Surekha turned bitter, like a karela, and blamed Sara completely. For her loneliness,  for the emptiness in her life, for her failing career, for the compulsion of having to look after her ailing mother all alone. Sara was so busy making her life, having one kid after the other, writing one novel after the other, that she could not care less for the ill mother, or the swamped and stunted life of her sister. No sir! God forbid, Sara could not be called upon to share the responsibility which was half hers in any case. 

Surekha became more and more bitter as she felt life passing her by. She had to bypass career opportunities as she had to turn down transfers and postings in exciting locations because of her mother,  who was steadily deteriorating after her husband’s death. Media, in any case, is a young person’s field. If the older clique moved with the times and made good their positions while the sun was shining on them,  great. Otherwise, you were bound to be shunted aside.

With only frustration in the kind of assignments she was receiving because of her limitations, and refusing to report to someone much younger than her, Surekha quit her regular job and started freelancing as a guest correspondent.  

She was resigned now to her life. And becoming more and more entrenched in her ways. There was no scope of her ever forgiving or resuming conversation with her extremely selfish sister. Never. 

Looking after the house, looking after her mother, looking after the numerous investments made after her father’s business was sold, and writing her guest columns, this alone was the span of her life. A life regulated and punctuated by the clock. Rigorous, patterned, and spartan. 

Till her mother died, and left a will that shocked Surekha.