I shall ensure that Dimple too grows up to be as happy as I am. That’s my promise to myself.

Dimple’s Brother

Is there an untold story in the preceding chapter?

There are two of them.

Dimple’s mother is so completely in victim mode that she has absolutely no intention of not deriving her power from this role.

She has been in scattered forms of therapy since many years, she enjoys this thoroughly—the undivided attention that the women counsellors give her. She has taught herself to use the right phrases from the books she reads on feminism and sexuality and she uses this jargon judiciously, appropriately. She plays psychological hide-and-seek with counsellors when they begin cracking through her veneer and point out that she is exactly like her parents and husband, never there for their children. Dimple’s mother leaves home by noon almost every day to play cards, discuss books and films with friends at assorted coffee shops, watch movies, do ‘social work’ and attend work-sessions on ‘finding one’s self’. Sometimes she does not come back in the night, having spent it at the homes of her various ‘emancipated’ women friends where they discuss ways and means of writing the ultimate book on women’s liberation. She keeps in touch with her children about their studies and the servants about the dinner menu on her cell phone.

Dimple’s mother delicately, and graciously, changes counsellors when their sessions reach the point where a mirror is held up to her. It is high time, the mirror tells her, that she realized she is leading a pathetic life and worked, instead, on improving the future instead of worsening it for herself and her children. Dimple’s mother asks with intentionally subdued passion, ‘But what about me, the child in me who feels her parents have let her down?’ Then she changes counsellors to move on to the next one where she elegantly lights her cigarettes, flicks her untied hair in an exhausted manner and proceeds to plumb for new depths of deprivation as she goes through her routine of appearing to emotionally bleed herself for what she sees as her audience. She sighs, she shudders, she gasps.

And she refuses to admit that she was simply not there—in affection, emotion and strength—when she walked in on her son being sexually molested by their cook.

She sent her son to bed, sacked the cook when she could get another a few days later, and told her husband nothing. She told him about Dimple because her survival instincts about her own marriage galvanized her to do so.

Dimple’s brother hesitantly, one weekend when Dimple’s mother had gone to find herself in an out-of-town workshop, spoke to his father. He cried, his little body convulsing with his sobs, as he pressed his fists into his eyes so that he could prevent his tears from pouring out of them. His father gripped his shoulders—father and son, one Sunday morning as the sun lit up their tastefully-appointed living room on Prithviraj Road—and said, ‘In the future, you tell me. Together we will bash up the bastard who dares to touch you again.’