Scene: 2

I am travelling again and will be travelling for another week. I haven't found time to sit and write a decent post so I am posting the second scene from my book. I had posted the first scene sometime in January.


"‘Why haven’t you opened it yet?’ Ma asked, coming out of the kitchen holding a vessel. She scooped rice from it into my plate.

When I did not answer she nudged the envelope closer towards me. I did not even want to touch it. I did not want to have anything to do with it I wanted to tell her. When I pushed it away she sighed and emptied the vessel of rice into my plate. The rice formed a mound that appeared like a small steaming white mountain just inches away from the tip.of my nose.

‘Do you know,’ Ma said, not meeting my eye, ‘I won’t die until you get a decent job and marry a sweet girl?’ She poured the entire fish curry from the vessel she had cooked it in into my plate. That was her way of telling me that she would go hungry. Ma did such things when she sulked.

‘Really?’ I said, trying to be sarcastic. ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said and pushed the envelope away again, out of my sight. Ma moved it back to its old position, right under the rim of the plate.

‘I am just twenty five years old while you are not even sixty,’ I said, ‘you still have a long life ahead. I don’t have any plans either of a decent job, or of marrying a sweet girl,’ I retorted, ‘so don’t worry about dying.’

‘Why can’t you be smart like everyone and grab the opportunity that’s fallen in your lap?’ Ma asked, picking up the envelope and waving it at me. ‘For God’s sake, it is a safe and secure job!’ She slapped it back on the table.

‘How many times have I told you that I can never dream of a more exciting and satisfying job than the one I am doing now?’ I asked, glaring at her and trying not to get irritated.

‘I don’t understand why you insist on doing that lousy job. You’re there in the office from nine in the morning until late in the night. For all that effort you don’t even get three thousand rupees,’ she said, standing in the doorway of the kitchen. The storm had begun. Now she would go on every minute of her waking day and also in the night, about how ungrateful I was, about how dumb I was not to accept the secure job, and about how I was wasting my time daydreaming and so on.

I did not know how to make her understand that with my present job as a copywriter in an advertising agency I was on my way to realize my dream. I wanted to get into the movies as a scriptwriter and graduate towards directing if I was lucky. Copywriting was hard work but it was one easy route to scriptwriting I thought. It also had a touch of glamour to it that the other job would never give me. But how do I explain all that to my innocent Ma?

I looked again at the envelope on the table after she disappeared into the kitchen. It wasn’t even a proper envelope. It was one crudely fashioned out of brown paper of a rough variety. I could see the dark stains where the flap on the back was sealed with homemade gum. There were half a dozen of those kinds of stamps which no one would even look at, much less collect them. They had also got my name wrong. It was spelt as ‘Suneel Kumar’ instead of ‘Sunil Kumar.’ I was tempted to tear up the stupid thing into a million pieces. "