Tears burn in Amara’s weary eyes as she closes the newest letter from home carefully, as if cradling the last traces of her family she has. Skimming through the words, thinking of the painstaking effort taken to write down every hateful word scratched on that paper. She tosses it into the pile, which is short but rapidly increasing in height.
She sits in the forest clearing, at the campsite around the bonfire. She pulls out her research, forcing herself to focus instead on the study she’d been sent away from home for. Months of fights, ugly, never-ending back and forths, increasing the drift between them until it expanded to the size of an ocean. And before that, years of snide comments, but in a relatively happy childhood otherwise. The memory of her father chasing her around the house as she giggled and ran while her mother looked on with a calm, serene smile was a beautiful time that would remain just a memory. Because she was no longer daddy’s little girl, and neither was she her mother’s princess any more. There was silence around her, and chaos in her heart and mind when everything in her ached for loving chaos around her and silence in her heart and mind. She was snapped out of her thoughts when her old mentor returned from his walk. “Best regards from the Sun,” he murmured, smiling, “It’ll be a little late today.” His student smiled up at him in an attempt to look brave, but it looked watery.
The mentor, wise as ever, picks up the stack of letters from the ground, flipping through them nonchalantly. He pauses for a second and looks her straight in the eyes, dropping every letter into the fire, one by one, and they light up like dry leaves. She is startled, and her first response is fleeting panic. No, no, no, this cannot be happening. Because, regardless of every cruel word, those are the last things she has of her family. But her next reaction is ever-so-sweet satisfaction. Because those things, those mere papers were ones that she clutched to her chest, tears wrung from her eyes, now in flames.
Those were the last things she’d had of her family.
Good riddance.
Now? All she had left of them was her DNA. Her father’s eyes, filled with the same fueling rage that he never wanted her to have; her mother’s hair that she cut short to keep it out of the way, but her mother always thought she looked prettier with longer hair. Daughters, when leaving the home to go to another home, leave with love being showered onto them, gifts and blessings. Her parents never accepted that her research was her home, so she left with scornful looks, raised voices and an aching heart.
And that face that she got from them would be the face her family would see one day, on national television, praised for her work. They’d see the eyes and the mouth they’d tried so hard to school into looking meek, set in a straight, determined look. A mask. Because deep down, the little girl in her only wanted to excitedly show her parents all she had achieved and how far she had come, but she had grown up. They’d never be able to insist that getting married would be better for her, that it was time she learned the work of the household and learned her supposedly true place–as the wife of some man who went to work and whose only want in life was to come back to a clean house. She never wanted that for herself. She was working towards something her parents couldn’t understand, that the importance of being compared to a family’s clean house was incredibly bigger, no matter how hard she had tried. And these letters–calling her a disgrace, and saying such harsh things that no parent should ever breathe them near their child–were her last keepsakes of them. The mask falls, and a tear slips down her cheek.
Her mentor spoke, “All of these–these words of people who tried to undermine your soul–will be nothing but kindling for the fire you hold while you get there.”
And she felt it, tears still on her face, eyes still set on the fire, flames of their very own in her eyes. She absorbed the mask. She picked up the book again; she had work to do.
And work she did. She and her mentor researched and travelled, and eventually set up a lab in a forest clearing. She wouldn’t be distracted from her work even if the lab had burned down, and did it diligently as more researchers and scientists joined to work shoulder to shoulder with them, and in the evening, sat around a big bonfire, laughed and sang under the stars, and she thought this is what a family is like. The people who would protect you and laugh with you and support you. She had always thought family was who you were born into. Instead, she learnt that she felt at home with these people who made jokes around the fire but held her steady in the lab, come what may.
Their research took the world by storm, and they stood shoulder to shoulder and rejoiced as the world showered praise upon them.
In a small town in the corner of the world, the old, beaten-up TV set was switched off.
In a small town in the corner of the world, the same TV set was started up again, as Amara’s mother sits down on the sofa and watches with tears in her eyes, and her father stands behind the sofa and his brow unfurrows just in the slightest, both of them simultaneously thinking, “My daughter did it.” And they both feel a wave of regret.
Amara smiles at the camera, hoping her parents are watching. So they can see her now and all she’s accomplished. Little does she know, the TV set in a small town in a corner of the world has switched off. Because some things just never change. She keeps smiling because they can’t take this away from her.
Diya Mittai
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