‘D’ Is For Duty

As a little girl, Sharada had been very fond of reading the dictionary. It surprised everyone, friends, family and teachers alike. When most children were fathoms deep in Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, ‘Tell-Me-why’ and the like, Sharada could be found tucked into a nook, muttering strange words under her breath.
Perhaps it was because she lived in a large, chaotic joint family in an even larger house which always looked as if a whirlwind had blown through it. She was a lover of order, a neat freak, and the dictionary was her escape to an orderly world where ‘there was a place for everything and everything was in its place’. As she grew older, she started looking for natural order and finding nothing more interesting than the perfectly co- ordinated functioning of the human body, chose to become a physician so that it could be her life-long job to restore order to disorder. She thrived on it and how!

Marriage and family did not deter her from her calling and now while she ran a perfectly neat home, she occasionally got down her well-thumbed copy of Miriam Webster, for old time’s sake. It had been a sort of yearly ritual, two letters a month so that the dictionary could be finished in a year. Now-a-days, she found it difficult to stick to her dictionary schedule though, and hence picked the letters randomly.
The past year had been one which her order-loving soul had loathed, thanks to the pandemic which had blown life so off course, that it was getting increasingly difficult to find the way back to safe harbors for many. Sharada had been a “front-line worker” and though the welts on her cheeks caused by the respirator had faded, she knew that the welts left on her soul by the heavy loss of life would always remain. Now that the vaccination drive was in full swing, she hoped for a breather, and a break which she sorely needed.

She called the past year the ‘Year of the D’, a dragon like disease, dedication, and increasing desperation being the chief words coming to her mind. There had been a dearth of medicines and oxygen, hope drying up with each new death. Dire straits, dreadful times and a demonic virus. The tide thankfully seemed to be turning now. Perhaps normalcy would return.
But a phone call proved that this was still a distant dream. Suman ji, Sharada’s mother -in-law who had been a diabetic for quite a few years now had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Sushil ji, her father-in-law although a GP himself was aging and found it next to impossible to manage his wife’s illness. In addition to her kidneys being affected, Suman ji had suffered an injury to her foot and it had rapidly morphed into gangrene, necessitating an amputation of the fourth and fifth toes of the right foot. Since Sanjeev, her son and Sharada’s husband, was a surgeon, it was only right that he performed the surgery himself, in Mumbai, where he lived. Besides, Sharada’s expertise as a physician would be put to good use.
If Suman ji had a fault, it was that she was a foodie in the real sense of the word. Since she was a good cook, it naturally followed that she should love sampling her own offerings. Her home-town of Indore was renowned throughout the country for its delectable cuisine, especially the night market of Sarafa Bazar which came into its own on long, leisurely evenings, offering delectable treats to tickle the most finicky of tastebuds.

A life-time of home making had left Suman ji lonely when her chicks flew the nest. With dwindling visits from sundry other relatives grown too old to travel, came an all- pervading loneliness which found an outlet in binge eating, gradually becoming a habit. Before she knew it, her diet had become a demon bent on consuming her as she fell prey to diabetes, which grew so rapidly and to such unprecedented levels that it brought doom in that she had to leave her home town. But even worse, she had to leave her beloved daughter, Rewa.

Suman ji was a woman who lived her life by the ‘old code’. Thus, her obstinate outlook that her daughter was the best at whatever she did. Of course, it helped that both of them shared a similar love for titivating, occasional gossip, kitty parties, one upmanship and most importantly, food. Rewa would never be content with running a home like her mom and was an up-and-coming architect. To have a house designed by her firm ‘GenXLive’ was the ‘in thing’ in Indore and she was fighting off several of the well-heeled thronging her office. Her children, Arnav and Priya had been cared for by their ‘Nani’ in infancy and early childhood so that she could pursue her career unhindered. Not that any of them had much time for Nani now, deeply immersed as they were in their busy lives. While this feeling of being made redundant perhaps hurt Suman ji, she would never ever utter anything against her daughter. Instead, she thanked her stars that she got to see them occasionally at least and hence, the move to Mumbai hit her harder than imagined. It did not help that Sharada was her complete antithesis in most things.

Quiet, disciplined and serious, Sharada was mentally described as dour, dry and distant by her mother-in-law. She found her bookish tendencies rather ‘show-offy’ and unladylike. The still waters which ran deep in Sharada’s case left Suman ji truly out of her depth and she hated floundering. Added to this, was the fact that Sharada was extremely determined and exacting where her patients were concerned and now that her mother-in -law was one of them, she was given neither deference nor quarter for her position or seniority. She knew that the strict diet that she had enforced did not go down well with Suman ji, but her hands were tied. If her mother-in-law was to limp back on the long road to recovery, she would have to follow Sharada’s exacting routine complete with a draconian diet which comprehensively excluded all things sweet, deep-fried or seasoned with excessive salt.

Suman ji hated Sharada hovering over her at meal times. She hated the bland food dished up with unfailing regularity four times a day, hated Sharada’s barely concealed impatience at repeatedly having to cajole her to eat, but most of all she hated that Sharada was not Rewa and never would be. No frippery, no embellishment of words or face and no overflowing emotions. The almost machine-like efficiency with which Sharada accomplished her tasks set Suman ji’s teeth on edge. How she longed to return, to her hearth and home and most of all her beloved daughter!
**

Rewa preened as she adjusted the pleats of her peacock blue Maheshwari saree. Today was the day she had been working towards all year. Her interview on ‘Madhya Pradesh Aaj’ was scheduled for 6pm. She thrummed with excitement and energy. The success of ‘GenXLive’ artfully combined with a few well-placed contacts in the right places translated into a prime-time slot on the flagship show ‘Bulandi’ which was aired live on the last Saturday of every month. ‘Indore Daily’ was planning to carry a feature on a few of her latest architectural designs in the New Year. A few nominations for the up- and- coming Indore Annual awards were also in the bag. The sky was hers for the taking.
“Credible, capable and creative”, was how she had been described for as long as she could remember, the image first fostered by family and later by friends and clients. While there was no question about her creativity and capability, what she had always excelled at was stealing the lime-light, being blessed with credible looks and a confidence bordering on brashness. The greatest champion she had was of course, Suman ji who credited her with extraordinary management skills, intelligence and all the qualities necessary for a complete woman. Today’s interview would be for want of a better phrase, her ‘crowning glory’.
Suman ji had wept unabashedly at the sight of her daughter on TV and her joy knew no bounds when Rewa graciously acknowledged Suman ji’s role in her success. The phone had been ringing off the hook with congratulatory calls from relatives and friends. In fact, a couple of weeks later, Suman ji was crediting Rewa for her recovery as well, thanks to a famous physician friend of hers, who often called and advised Sharada about the regimen she was following with her mother-in-law. If Sharada found this galling, she kept her thoughts to herself as there was hardly anything she could do about it.
And thus, Diwali drew to a close and the diyas and decorations were put away. Darkness came earlier and earlier on stealthy paws these days. Sharada looked at her mother-in-law’s reports and then at the letter on her desk. The decision she had been dreading could not be put off any further. Opening up her laptop, she began to type “I sincerely regret that I am unable to take up your kind offer of a travelling fellowship to the Joslin Diabetes Center for the current year. I sincerely hope that I may be considered eligible in the near future”. She pressed send without reading the letter through and left the study with a sense of finality.
It was time for Suman ji’s medications. In Sharada’s dictionary, ‘D’ meant many things, but the first word which came to her mind was ‘duty’ and duty alone.