Though belated, Sukanya has now got the resolve.
Over twenty-odd years she has been going through consuming angst that welled up in profoundly bitter tears which trickled down into oblivion – the tears that once held out an eloquent testimony of a girl’s fate rewritten! A combination of fear and loathing provoked a blind rage in her, eventually drying up every drop of those tears. Emotional feelings being materially parched, a schism opened up between her sentiments and obligations to the familial root. Perhaps cursing her own imbrued fate that was predestined by the crass bigotry of her conceited custodians ultimately she decided to stomp off the fold.
Humanly suppressing all the innate cravings of a full-fledged youth she has been all the while asking for only one favour, justice to the rule of nature- virtual beggary to the social fairness. Time and again she desperately pleaded to lift the heavily hanging mantle coerced upon her having been deprived of a matrimonial companionship. Any endeavour for emancipation was inexorably precluded by the hide-bound society virtually stalling a thriving youth in the rigid confines of conventional fetters for she happened to be born amidst a bunch of fundamentalists.
No less than four well-regarded marriage proposals she had received with sated consent, the latest one being from an Adonis. He too was ruthlessly discarded from the wed lock proposition by her fanatic father.
You ask: Why, anything wrong with the boy?
Not at all! He is a beau ideal with an immaculate background overall, has a Doctorate in Psychology, practises in Ireland having established his own clinic.
You wouldn’t wait for the next query: Did he like the girl?
Indeed, he did.
What then is the fuss all about, you wonder!
The answer is simple: Horoscope!
You must be kidding, you retort.
Not, at all.
Well, then please unravel the conundrum, you shout.
After a long pause you are told: Apparently he has ‘Chovva dosham’
So what?
Stigma!
The proposed girl became the victim again. Her fanatic parents blatantly rejected the proposal. Her mother couldn’t be blamed since she had no educational background nor had much exposure to the outside world. But her father was well versed in academia. He had been a Dean of faculty of Sociology, in Ottawa University. The paradox of the whole myth is that his eldest son, chip off the old block, a prodigy of Harvard University, had been engaged in wedlock with a girl of a perfect horoscope. The young wife, an embodiment of her passionate husband, died of brain cancer. His second wife, another discovery with a perfect match of horoscope won after a relentless search, abandoned him after little more than a year leaving behind a mentally retarded progeny. The child was born in immaculate astrological conditions claimed to have ideally belonged to a perfect star.
Having gone through a series of nightmarish events of her adulthood she grew weary and often licked her wilted lips. Her lips trembled when she recollected those lines she once read somewhere:
‘Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday... If you spend your life hopelessly waiting for the blue bird of happiness to fly over you....’
And she was now starting to think she had had enough. She was determined to venture out of the murky corridors of her past. Summoning all courage she took a daunting decision to pick her pen, and started writing on her father’s letter pad with tremulous hands... As she finished the last sentence, the tears she had been struggling to hold back suddenly trickled, wetting the page....
Leaving the written letter-pad open under the lamp-shade, with tears in the eye and solo bidding wordless goodbye at the gate as ears shut against the yelping dog’s unanswerable plea behind the corroded iron bars of the squeaky gate, she strode briskly from a colossal pulpit of dogma devoid of sanctity....
Dear Mum and Dad,
Kill me, I am beckoning you... Here I am, still lamenting at the inevitable intersection on the road of life not knowing which way to turn, after a bloody long, perturbed, wait. I am drained out with life. I need to seek some stimulus to my tired soul, brain and the body. Whimsical tales of days gone by with lot of teeth-gnashing and hand-wriggling will now remain just as worthless memories to me.
At last, I reckon, I have found my way... I know I have to break away the unwieldy shackles once and for all before I continue my journey. I know I have to hurt your feelings by doing just that, but forgive me. Nonetheless I need your blessings all the way through my pursuit of self-effacingly simple but a meaningful life that I yearn to capture...
Before I write anything further, let me ask those who took the spiteful decisions to reject all those marriage proposals brought forth by many a fond lover in the light of Horoscope match, the enigmatic practice of foretelling future events by looking at the stars and planets. Given that the practice well agrees with the logic of all related science, be it of Yesterday or Today, being a victim who carries a mutilated soul I dissent with might and main:
Who has prepared this diagram of the heavens? And what accuracy can one claim and expect from the person or persons who originally drew this?
To draw this supposedly most complex diagram and related charts, what were the basics of extremely complex calculations and conditional criteria that are directly applied in those predictable (may it be probable) outcomes in real life? How was it possible to contrive such precise benchmarks in order to predict all the future events in one’s life, presumably due to the influence of the particular star’s position to the planet and their interactions at the time of one’s birth? Is there, by any chance, an involvement of divine power?
Given the optimum accuracy of the position and the calculations of the Star and the Planet measured at the ancient time and the resultant conclusions being derived at that clime and condition of the aeon, how one can so positively place full faith at the present context? More so when we find ourselves in a new era that has lost the continuity of close and constant trace of movements of stars and the planets extant up there in the orbital paths of almost infinitely boundless galaxies?
Does it not necessitate that we now trace precisely where the current position of that particular star is in the constellation to reassess the absolute causes imparted on the life of the one who is said to have been subjected to bear this impact by the sheer timing of his/her birth?
The light emitted from a star, as it is scientifically established, takes millions of light-years to reach the earth where we are born and survive, not to mention the impossibility of defining the length of that time within the tolerance of even 100 years. This being the globally accepted absolute reality how on earth, by any logic, can one relate the period of one’s birth within a matter of hours to the star to be able to construe the effects that are induced to one’s life so convincingly by that particular star, hence precisely corroborate the person’s destiny?
Then again taking everything that astrology claims for granted, what guarantee do you have that the one who wrote the horoscope was authoritative and truthful, and what he/she wrote was alright in the first place? Why are his/her analyses or the interpretations and the subsequent conclusions not questionable?
What if there happened to be a blunder in the originally written horoscope that was found to be impossible to trace back? Doesn’t this mean due to the bungle the subject person is forbidden from getting married to a girl of his choice - an act devoid of pragmatic consolation that can inevitably mount to be a disgraceful act against God’s wish?
I am not agnostic nor a nihilist. I don’t dare to totally denounce the mythical follies of ancient customs and the ardent followings of the millions. But I do attempt to analyse the pros and cons of that ancient social system and its relevance in this contemporary social infrastructure. While I try to hold the whole story in a positive light, keeping all the objectives firmly in mind I fail utterly to find an answer. When I look at the outcome everything seems to be placed in a total imbroglio.
I don’t want to proselytise you at all by unfolding my perceptions and the views I hold in relation to our religious beliefs and practice. I am only trying to highlight the potentially harmful elements of our otherwise theologically enriched religion. Whatever may be the case, the effects of your beliefs were implosive. They have irreparably devastated my life....
And, I do ask standing upright on this mother-earth for a convincing answer to my earnest queries from someone in society who is capable to honestly do so.
