Disown to Own
“How the glaring shadow of my life came to distort my vision!” he continued in lament. “The grandiose ‘Imperial Infrastructures’ was the stilted idea of my fucked-up psyche, and as if man’s fate factors the times he lives in to shape his life, Harshad Mehta came onto the scene; can one ever fail to recall the euphoria he had helped generate in the bourses? Hadn’t business magazines, all and sundry that is, goaded the public to sell the family silver to invest in stocks? Oh, how the public issues of never-heard-of-entities without a factory shed to name came to be oversubscribed many times over; and when the bubble was burst as Mehta was caught stealing, how many became broke no one knows. Why, I too was guilty of laying the superstructure of ‘Imperial Infrastructures’ over the tenuous foundations of Rajan Builders; wonder how I suffered no qualms in gambling with the public monies to raise my domestic stock; but my love for my woman and the luck of the investors might have helped me succeed in my unethical venture; whatever, it was then that I lost my soul and became a devil’s slave, though I didn’t realize it then.’
“Once man crosses the moral threshold, he’s likely to lose the reins of his life.”
“True, but I met a woman who had been astray for a while and yet regained her moral ground just in time,” he said with apparent admiration. “She was the wife of a man of meager means who had big dreams for their twins, a boy and a girl; so he strived to improve his net worth through hard work to uplift their future. But when he realized that his hard work alone was not enough to ensure their rosy future, he had pleaded with her to prostitute herself to fashion their future. Well, like any other woman, she was averse to the idea, but in time, as his obsession for her kids’ future dented her resolve to remain chaste, she started making other men feel at home when her man and her kids were away from it. What with the referrals from those philanderers helped her to develop a fetching clientele, her earnings far exceeded her man’s expectations, but as he worked harder than ever to augment their fund, she moved ever emotionally closer to him, and ironically, as if to lighten his burden, she endeared herself more than ever to other men. When I came to know of her, I approached her with great expectations but how disappointed I was is still fresh in my memory; as I knocked at her door that morning, I found her readying her kids to school; fascinated by her beauty, I was all eager to have her but she told me that she had drawn the curtains down as she didn’t want her growing up kids to smell the rat. Bowled by her sensitivity (I hadn’t become insensitive yet), I pressed my suit to the hilt but finding her unyielding, I even begged her not to disappoint me, but with a charming firmness, she asked me to update my informer about the change in her posture. So, I left her as much in disappointment as in admiration, only to meet her on a different footing later on; how small the world can become.”