“You must have really hated me when I was a child,” Vishakha said quietly to her mother, Kaushini.
Kaushini froze. “What kind of question is that? What are you trying to imply?” Her shock slowly twisted into a mixture of anger and hurt—a strange, familiar feeling she found herself experiencing more often these days.
Vishakha didn’t respond. Her heart was pounding, her stomach churning. She felt numb. The pain of 35 long years suddenly surged through every inch of her body. She didn’t know how to control it. She didn’t want to control it. It was time to speak her truth.
She looked up slowly, her eyes meeting her mother’s.
“Ma, there are so many moments from my childhood where your actions made it clear you couldn’t even tolerate me. You never hugged me, not as a child, not while I was growing up. You were always irritated with me. You never had a kind word to say about me. I grew up thinking I was ugly… useless. You once called me heartless. You even said a dog would have been better than me for you.”
She paused. Her voice was cracking, and she hated it—hated that her mother could still affect her like this. She didn’t want to show that these things still mattered, even after 35 years. So she fought her tears, clenched them tight in her eyes, and swallowed her cry—a trick she had mastered through childhood, when night after night she cried herself to sleep, silently, with nothing but her own pain and existence.
“Ma, do you remember I used to have terrible breathing problems when I was little? It got so bad, you had to pull me out of dance classes for a while. During those attacks… it wasn’t just a physical struggle. It was panic. I had to focus so hard just to get air into my lungs. Any noise around me would throw me off. I’d try again and again—on the sixth, or seventh, or twelfth attempt, I’d finally catch a breath.
Once, during one of those moments—when I felt like I was fighting for my life—I asked Bhai to stop talking. I was barely holding on, and the noise was making it worse. You came rushing in from the next room and shouted at me, ‘If you’re having a breathing problem, you expect everyone else to stop what they’re doing? Get real!’ Then you left.
And I blamed myself. Again. Like always. I believed I was the problem, even for trying to breathe.”
Her voice trailed off, heavy with memories of lonely, unbearable days.
Kaushini snapped, furious. “You’re making me out to be a monster! I don’t remember any of that. These are your imaginations! Now stop it.”
Vishakha smiled sadly. She had expected this. This was exactly how her mother had always responded—by denying, deflecting, turning everything around to make it Vishakha’s fault. Even now, she woke up from nightmares where her mother was yelling at her, punishing her for something she didn’t understand, her words slicing through Vishakha’s heart like knives.
“Ma, why did you leave me with your parents after I was born and not take me back until I was 18 months old? I was a sick baby, right? Underweight, because you were very ill during your pregnancy. Then how could you stay away from me? How could a mother not want to be with her newborn? Weren’t you worried? Didn’t you care?”
Kaushini was silent. Her rage had shifted into a quiet detachment, lost in old thoughts of what could have been. She was once the golden girl—radiant in school and college, a radio artist, an award-winning elocutionist, the first female leader of her college’s student political wing. Beautiful and brilliant, the world had been at her feet. Men of all kinds had tried to win her over, and she had brushed them aside with ease. She had dreams. She had fire. She could have been a famous singer. A fierce politician. A queen, even—revered and adored.
But she got married.
To the wrong man. Into the wrong family. Into the wrong life.
And everything changed.
“All I became was a cook and a maid for my husband,” she thought bitterly. “And then I got bloody pregnant.” Her face flushed with renewed anger. That pregnancy had felt like the final nail in her coffin, sealing her into a life she never wanted. “I could have been someone else if…” Her thought was interrupted by her daughter’s voice.
“Ma, do you remember that car accident? The one after which I had a miscarriage, and my marriage ended? I came home, broken… destroyed. I was sitting next to you, desperate for comfort, for someone to hold me and tell me that I’d be okay. That I still had reasons to live.
And you told me a story. You told me how terrible your own marriage was, how you and Dad fought constantly and had decided to get a divorce. And then… you found out you were pregnant. You said you were furious. You knew that once your parents found out, they’d never let you leave. Even if you did manage a divorce, having a child would ruin your chances of the life you wanted. So, you tried to induce a miscarriage—by behaving recklessly. So that no one could blame you.
But you failed.
And I was born.”
Vishakha looked at her mother, her voice steady.
“Why did you tell me that story on that day? That day, all I needed was love. An embrace. A reason to keep going. And instead, you told me I shouldn’t have existed in the first place.”
Tears were streaming down her face, and this time, she didn’t hold them back.
“Ma, now I understand why you hated me so much,” she whispered. Her tears were no longer just pain—they were release. She smiled through them.
At last, she had cut the old, rotten, suffocating umbilical cord.
It had taken her 35 years, but now she had the rest of her life ahead. Unattached. Healing. Free.
