The Woman I Could Never Be...

When I was in the second standard, an unreasonable relative, who was (unfortunately for me) interested in palmistry, told me, I’d take up ‘science’ as a line of study. I was just learning complex additions, water, gas, land breeze, sea breeze, and indoor plants in school, and doing reasonably well. Thus, my taking up science seemed quite a possibility.
As I grew up, I gradually realized that Math had the potential of making my life an unadulterated inferno. I conveyed this to the unreasonable relative. He had by then announced to all and sundry that I would be a doctor; this is because I had expressed keen interest in drawing nuclear cell diagrams all over my scrap book. After my confession that I hated Math, and I didn’t feel Biology was all that great either, the relative felt insulted. I had managed to make a complete mockery of his skills in palmistry. He stopped talking to my entire family, and till date, it’s status quo.

Have you’ll ever felt this way? I mean…dejected at not being able to be the person you dreamt you could be? Not that I wanted to be a doctor particularly. I knew I couldn’t ever make it there. But what about the other little aspirations? Aspirations like being a bespectacled professor in a cold New York apartment…having loads to do…getting at some theory on the influence of jazz on African American literature…occasionally having the time to look out of the window at a road full of dry fall leaves…living life off research money…getting interviewed by someone on History Channel…hiking across the Appalachian Trail…ever thought about such personal dreams?

Then there was this aspiration of living close to a lighthouse…close to moss-covered sinewy roads that would lead to a cornflower blue sea…close to a fisherman’s village in south India…close to a lonely mosque…close to all the Jonathan Livingstones in the world…

Then there was this mad dream about being a writer…living in an abandoned cottage in the Himalayas…Anita Desai made me think this way…Fire in the Mountains…awesome stuff!

Then there was this other thing I had about being single. No men, no love, no frills, no trouble...

Life of course, has turned out to be different. What pains sometimes, is my inability to live up to my own dreams…not the dreams of parents, not the dreams of friends, not the dreams of unreasonable relatives…

Maybe in the next life, I’d be that much dreamt of single woman writer, living in the mountains, relishing her privacy in a purple twilight, writing about lost worlds…