Amu heard of a death in the neighborhood
"It must have been that woman, that mad woman. Finally her suffering has come to an end", her mother said
The earliest memory of her that Amu had was of a hefty lady who would come home to borrow some food "My brothers do nothing for me. Those ******* don't take care of anything", she would say.
She had heard her neighbors talking about how big an embarrassment she was for the family. Sometimes there were news of her roaming about it rags, sometimes of her begging in front of temples. There were stories of her playing mother to her numerous brothers and sister. Of her being a widow, being married to an old man and loosing her husband. Of her being a burden. Of her shouting, of her noise.
Amu always wondered, why she was like that...she had no answers.
Twenty years later, Amu was still trying to understand the world. She now thought, "Imagine if my world is curtailed, if I have no other place to go apart from the four walls of a beautiful prison called home. If I were denied education for being a woman, but probably I wouldn't have realized it because it would have been normal for women to not study. Then I would have had to depend on others for my simple needs, ask for money and be denied. And be shown my place each time I try to raise a voice. Be looked at as unwanted for the lack of the legitimacy of belonging to a man. If my sexuality be denied.
If I had slogged my life for bringing up the imbecile kids and watch them go one by one in search of their own paths and be left there for wanting of attention, be thrown around like an old clock which has been running all along indicating the time, which suddenly became obsolete with the coming of mobiles......
But isn't this how every "normal" woman lives in our country.
But she has a mental illness, so what even Virginia Woolf suffered from bouts of depression. May be she could have been her, may be she could have been another Slyvia Plath....may be "
She didn't ask the question of what made her that way anymore....not even to herself.
She went to get a glimpse of her one last time, to have a look at that mad woman.
There she was sitting next to the corpse of her dead brother hurling abuses at the world...showing that ugly reflection to the society that no body wanted to see...