TWO SISTERS - PART 4

MATURE CONTENT | Reader Discretion Advised

SARA

The next morning, Sara walks home to find her father dead, her sister harried and making all the arrangements, and her mother comatose with grief. She was shocked. Her father. There was no space to share or express what happened to her because of her own irresponsibility with anyone. Her sister met her eyes with grave rejection and judgment. Her mother sought her shoulder for consolation. And she just became silent.  

The silence inside her grew. As did her vivaciousness outside. No one, no one will ever get to know what happened to her that night. Never. Not while her father was dying.  

She realised she was pregnant. She wanted an abortion. Immediately. But she was scared. And alone.

All because of her sister. If only she had not called her mother away, she would have received help and been with her father when he died. All her sister’s fault. She was slowly getting convinced. But her mother was also slowly losing control and handing over all authority to her sister. She began to hate her sister and feel sorry for her mother. She was claustrophobic, scared, and pregnant. She needed to get out and become financially independent at once. 

She decided to get married. Immediately.

All the wrong reasons to choose absolutely the wrong man. She was sure she would give up her child for adoption. Yet when the baby was born, her son, she was filled with a love for him that went beyond her abuse, and the association between that fateful night and this child melted somewhere for her. He was her son. Her golden child. She showered him with all her love. And continued to cuckold her husband. He was inanimate for her in any case. His presence in her life, a matter of convenience. Just a stepping stone with his business connections, and easy money, an advancement to her career, till he insisted he wanted a child from her if she continued to want the goodies. And so came her daughter. Another child born through loveless consummation.

One day, after fifteen years of loveless marriage farce, she decided enough was enough. And left her husband. He refused to support her or her children. She didn’t care and worked herself to a bone living the role of a single mother. Why? She didn’t quite understand herself. 

In all these years, though she had kept in touch with her ailing mother, she had never gone to live with her. Or tried to resolve her relationship with her sister. Despite her mother’s constant wailings.  

After her divorce, during one of her softer moments with her mother, she had shared about that fateful night. Her mother subsequently had become riddled with guilt, and her efforts to patch up the sisters had doubled. But the rock-like resistance emanating from the two of them had kept the two sisters apart like two negative charges in a magnetic field. 

She had spent a lifetime trying to heal her feminine and now practised alternate spirituality with a vengeance, constantly trying to find her peace through the balancing of her chakras.  

Her outlet was her creative fiction, where she wove a world for herself, a world where she was always in control of the outcome. A world so contrary to her reality where everything always spun out of her control despite the crystals, gems, tarots… and storytelling …. 

Till her mother died.

And left a will that compelled the two sisters to live under the same roof in their family house for a year.

Without fighting. 

For the story of that year, watch the play 45”35”55”