Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel

‘The dilemma is real and when synthesized, maybe your saga could help.”

“So I take it that you’re inclined to pen it,” he said in excitement. “Spoiled though my son was in every way, yet he was no snob. But the aberration in his character was his inability to take ‘no’ for an answer, and that was bad enough; so to say, it became a case of, ‘as is father so is son’, but with a difference. Like me, he too managed a scrape-through degree, but unlike me, the girl he loved was all eager to become his better half. When he introduced Uma to us as his future wife, Ruma and I were dumbfounded; I couldn’t figure out my son’s poor taste to fall for a plain girl and Ruma felt her upbringing of him had no meaning if he were to choose someone so plebeian for a wife. When we tried to make him understand about her unsuitability, he said we wouldn’t be saying so if only we could’ve divined her inner beauty; as we gave in, despite our better judgment, he led his first love to the altar of marriage amidst great fanfare.”

“It was as well; otherwise it would’ve been a shame to have induced him to desert her.”

“Oh, won’t that prove there’s always a need to look at things from the others’ perspective as well,” he continued. “But as it happened, she turned out to be a gold-digger; what was worse, she was immoral to the core of her heart; as she gave him hell from the day one, he realized what a third-rate bitch his wife was. Maybe man can understand another man if he were to be his boss and a woman when he takes her as his wife. With the imagined inner beauty becoming the mirage of his married life, as Satish became an emotional wreck, I felt guilty for not having taught him the virtue of judging people for their small gestures; if only I had parented him properly, maybe he wouldn’t have had to undergo that trauma. Oh, what it had taken us to rescue the poor fellow from her clutches only we knew; ultimately it was my threat to get her killed by hired hands, even at the risk of myself ending up on the gallows that made her agree to divorce him for a royal sum.”

‘Don’t I see your son has complexity for heredity?”

“Not only that,” he continued, “as if history repeats itself, it was a whore who played a part in his second marriage, that I came to know that from the man who had lost his wife to him.”