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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, a little girl was playing with her dolls, lost in her make believe world of happy endings and perfect love ….two of her three dolls had found the love of their lives and the third was on the brink of being rescued from the evil sorcerer……….just when the Prince had bent down to take her doll's hand and pull her on to his horse, a sharp scream pierced the air and she instantly gathered up her playthings and with shaking hands, hid them under the bed. In a moment, the sweet, innocent face had transformed into a picture of terror. With the ease of long practice, she quietly tiptoed from the edge of her bed to her wardrobe, swiftly opened the door and slid in. Crouching down, she had pulled the door shut. But no matter how hard she clamped her hands on her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, the pitiful screams would not go away. They would just be interspersed with words she knew were really bad and not to be repeated in front of anyone….yet, her father had no compunctions in using the very same words against her mother, time and time again. And he found nothing wrong in beating her up for anything and everything …..and when he was not physically abusing her, his verbal tirades would take over…….What was worse, he was not alone…..her two elder brothers were the same………..both of them treated she and her mother with utter disdain……to them, she and her mother were simply objects of mockery, to be ridiculed whenever the fancy took them.
Arpi wondered what was it that gave them the right to treat girls and women in such a mean fashion ; sometimes she asked her mother………each time she only got a wry smile for an answer. A smile that did nothing to quell the curiosity of an inquisitive and sharp mind. Questions after question swirled in the mind of the little girl………Has God willed it to be so? The man to be superior ? Be the Lord and Master of the woman? Did God ask her father to beat up her mother up? Why did her mother not complain? Was it because God was a man….but then what about the woman Godesses …did they have the same fate too? She specially liked Goddess Saraswati …..
As is wont, time passed and with each passing year, she started forming her own answers to these and many other questions. She decided that come what may, she would never allow herself to be trampled upon the way her mother had been all her life. She took heart from the perfect but difficult love story of Bhagwan Shiv and his wife Goddess Parvati……….and thus began her wait. A wait that would not last too long.
The month she turned seventeen, she came across an innocuous looking column in the newspaper that talked about someone called Bhayyaji who had saved two girls from fate worse than death! They had been returning home from school and had been attacked by a gang ….but this Bhayyaji had turned up from nowhere and beat the goons up single-handedly and saved the girls' honour. From then on, she scanned the newspaper everyday for any further news….few weeks later she got lucky. There it was…a whole front page story with the picture of just about the handsomest man she had ever seen. This time again the newstory showered all manner of praise on Bhayyaji, calling him a saviour of the poor, a messiah, a modern day Robin Hood. He had saved several small shopkeepers from the clutches of the so-called land mafia.
It was love at first sight for her……..in an instant, she realised that her Knight in Shining Armor had finally arrived. He was there to rescue her from her claustrophobic existence, to carry her away into a land of total and complete bliss, where the two of them would create a life and love together and live happily ever after.
She cut his picture out carefully and ran to her closet……….the same wardrobe that had been her refuge when she was a child, would now be turned into a shrine of sorts. Shrine to an idea and a dream. Slowly, she built that corner of the closet into a collage of Avadesh and his various moods. Whenever she found the chance, she would stand in front of it and talk to him about her hopes and dreams……………and more often then not, suddenly turn pink in the face and overcome with shyness, lower her eyes and swiftly draw her clothes over the pictures.
So much had happened since; not the least of which were two attempts on her life!!! But, the bottomline was that she was his wife – legally wedded, not once but twice. She had left behind her most beloved mother, made a mortal foe in her father, burned all her bridges, just to be with her heart's desire. And he had welcomed her with such heartbreaking tenderness and love:she had been in heaven. But then cruel fate had intruded in the guise of Bhouji……it had gone on to create conditions that had turned her husband into a stranger. An angry, murderously violent, extremely volatile stranger who had, in the blink of an eye, turned his back on her.
But she would not be deterred, she would not cower despite his volte-face; even though her moments of perfect happiness and bliss had been all too brief, nothing could change the fact that she was married to Avadesh. This knowledge and certitude was her biggest strength. It gave her the power and the sustenance to get up each morning from her lonely bed and face the myriad challenges of the day head on. It gave her the strength to fight the pain and bewilderment caused by each hurtful word from her husband.
She had begun to get some idea about the angst-filled, violent childhood that Avadesh had had; he had shared his painful past in all it's goriness with her. But she had also caught a glimpse of the innocent boy who had yearned for the simple pleasures of life. Most of all, she had begun to understand the double game that Bhouji played, that she had played with Avadesh all these years. Arpi had started to see that Bhouji was just using Avadesh for her own ends. She had fed him the hate-filled, revenge tripe all these years just so she could keep him under her control. But Arpi had decided to try her very best to make him see the error of his ways. She had vowed in her heart to counter the call to violence with an appeal to his better sensibilities; she would show him the power of love and its ability to overcome the darkest of hearts.
She knew that this was a battle to the finish, a battle she had to win; after all, the life, soul and sanity of her husband was at stake!
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