Sitting in his dingy room, as Rahul picked up the paper, a news caught his eye. Ms.Sujata Ray was elected as the youngest local councilor.
What worse luck one could have, he thought to himself. He folded the paper while his mind flashed back to the afternoon in his ancestral home. Bare-chested, he got out of bed. The black mole on his left arm caught his eye. It was a sore reminder of what someone, an astrologer perhaps, told him once. A black mole on the left hand of a man was always a bad omen.
It was not like Rahul was born deformed - had an extra finger or anything like that. On the contrary, in his late 60s, he was still handsome, intelligent and smart. Yet things rarely went the way he wanted them to.
He made a number of friends on account of his looks, intelligence and friendly nature. Most of them were girls. They liked Rahul and swooned over each other for his attention. Surprisingly, by the time he turned 30, he found that he was the only bachelor left amongst friends! In fact, few of them even had their kids by then! The girls including Sumana, who hoped to be Mrs. Ray, were all gone.
When she realized that her dream was never to be materialized, Sumana came up to his room one day, holding a card in her hand.
"You're getting married? How come you never told me?" Rahul asked her, having taken the wedding card out of the envelope.
It was a bolt from the blue for him.
"My parents were beginning to give up on my chances of getting married at 27, Rahul. I didn't want to be a burden on them for ever."
If Rahul expected her to tell him all this with a trembly mouth or tearful eyes, she conducted herself brilliantly that day. It was only after she had left that Rahul realised what a great wife she could have been for him. For anyone.
If his love-life was as barren as the Sahara desert, his work life was no better either. He tried his hands at a few jobs. Ended up being a physio with some training for six months. In that capacity, he met doctors, chemists, patients - some of whom were very influential. His euphoria didn't last long as he was thrown off his bike one night and suffered multiple injuries. It was ironic that the exercises and other things he had been prescribing to people till then, were found to be of no use for his recovery.
He became a social recluse in his early 40s!
Finding that Life was leaving him behind fast, Rahul opted for a hasty marriage to Ahana, a lady some thirteen years his younger. If his marriage was a hasty affair, his desire to sire a baby was even hastier. Exactly nine months after his marriage, Sujata, his only child was born.
Rahul was ecstatic to have Sujata in his life. She was a joy to be around. He devoted all his wakeful hours to tending the baby - feeding her, changing the nappies, lulling her to sleep and did what not for her love and comfort.
Ahana had, in the meantime, started treating him differently, more so after the birth of Sujata. Then one day when Sujata was 12 or 13, a quarrel broke out between Rahul and Ahana. Rahul went berserk in the end, yelling insanely at his wife.
"Get out of my house, you bitch. I should have known better than to have wasted some precious years of my life with a slut like you… "
Ahana kept quiet as always but what stunned Rahul was to find Sujata, her hands on her sides, eyes rolling, behaving hysterically.
"We aren't going to stay in this goddamned house any more, Mom. Let's get back to Granny's. How could you put up with this old bastard for so long is just beyond me! If you let me stay here a sec longer, I might do something that we both will regret. "
That was the night, Rahul realized, sitting in the dark room, after both of them had left, and not for the first time either, that despite his looks, intelligence and apparently friendly nature - Life hadn't treated him fair and square at all!
The end
