He was a schizophrenic.
I was kept in the dark.
It was an arranged marriage, one of those decisions that arrive wrapped in trust and tied with silence. I was nineteen, still hovering between adolescence and adulthood, my B.Com results not yet declared, when my engagement was fixed. They said he was everything a girl could hope for—highly educated, good-looking, soft-spoken, and in a secure government job.
I believed them.
At nineteen, belief comes easy. It doesn’t ask questions. It doesn’t demand proof.
I stepped out of my teens and into marriage like stepping into a story already written for me.
For a while, it felt normal. Or perhaps I convinced myself it was. The small oddities, the silences, the sudden bursts of anger that had no origin—I folded them into excuses. Stress, I thought. Work pressure. Everyone has flaws, I reminded myself.
Until the day reality stopped whispering and began to scream.
Diagnosis. Words I didn’t fully understand. Terms that felt clinical, distant, schizophrenia, instability, episodes. By the time I began to grasp their meaning, I was already living inside them.
And no one had told me.
Not before the wedding. Not before my life had been tied to his.
When I watched The Great Indian Kitchen years later, it felt like déjà vu, not in the rituals, not in the routines, but in the quiet suffocation. The unseen battles.
The loneliness that sits beside you even when the house is full.
The only difference was, I had two children when I found my way out, if you believe in life after death. Because that’s what it felt like.
A death.
And then, somehow, a beginning.
I didn’t walk out dramatically. There were no raised voices, no cinematic confrontations. Just a slow, steady realization that staying would mean dissolving entirely. And I had two small hands holding on to me.
So I left.
A single mother, with more fear than courage—but enough of both to keep moving.
I had my job. That became my anchor. My battlefield. My redemption.
I decided I would climb. Not because I dreamed of success, but because I feared failure. Because stability was no longer a comfort—it was a necessity.
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” people say lightly.
But no one tells you how bitter lemons can be.
He had lost his job by then. Declared unfit. Mental instability, they said. Officially stamped.
Quietly dismissed.
The world moved on.
But words have a way of lingering.
“My son will shine one day, earning in lakhs. And your daughter… she will regret this. By then she will be begging on the streets.”
The voice cut through the closed door, sharp and relentless.
I remember that day with unsettling clarity. I had opened the door just a fraction, enough to see without being seen. My father sat there, his head slightly bent, not in defeat, but in restraint. Listening. Always listening.
My mother sat beside him, her face tightened, anger and helplessness wrestling within her.
Across the room stood the woman, his mother, her words spilling out like water from a broken pipeline, unstoppable, unfiltered.
I closed the door quietly.
Something inside me hardened that day. Not anger, something colder. Something quieter. A resolve that didn’t need witnesses.
I worked.
Not just hard, relentlessly.
I studied with a vengeance I didn’t know I possessed. I took every opportunity, every transfer, every promotion that came my way. I learned to balance spreadsheets and school schedules, boardroom meetings and bedtime stories.
I watched my children grow, not just in height, but in strength. They learned responsibility not from lectures, but from watching me survive.
Years passed.
They studied well. Chose their paths wisely. Built lives of their own, steady and dignified. They became everything I had silently hoped for.
People said I had done well.
They said I was strong.
They said I had won.
But the fire inside me… it never quite died.
It just learned to stay quiet.
“Can you get me Appa’s diary? He wants to write down today’s expenses. The cost of vegetables has gone up…”
My mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen, soft, familiar.
I walked into his room, opened the drawer, and picked up the worn-out diary. As I flipped it open, a small newspaper cut-out slipped out and fell to the floor.
“OBITUARY.”
I picked it up, more out of instinct than curiosity.
And then I saw it.
A single line, circled faintly almost like a duty.
“She didn’t see me beg on the roads.”
I smiled. “Her wish did not materialise”
It wasn’t a loud smile. It didn’t carry triumph or pride. Just a quiet lifting at the corners of my lips, like a secret finally acknowledged.
I had done it.
As a mother. As a professional. As a human being.
I had lived through what was meant to break me.
And yet…
As I stood there, holding that fragile piece of paper, something stirred within me, an ache, deep and persistent.
Not for what I had lost, but for what I had seen.
Because some truths, once revealed, never leave you.
They sit within you, like shadows in broad daylight.
I closed the diary gently and placed the clipping back between its pages.
In the silence of that room, surrounded by years of survival, one question lingered, unanswered, unspoken:
Was strength the same as healing?
Or had I simply learned to live with the wound?
