eFiction India eFiction India Vol.02 Issue.09 | Page 11

STORIES

Deepti Razdan is a Ph.D Scholar at
the Department of English, Jamia
Millia Islamia. She completed her
M.Phil in English Literature from the
Department of English, Jamia Millia
Islamia and M.A (English) from Delhi
University. She has taught English
language and literature to undergraduates at Delhi University and Jamia
Millia Islamia. She is currently based
in Toronto.

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my parents wanted me to. I guess I just had mutated genes. I was always drawn towards
Mathematics and Science instead. It was fascinating how they succeeded in explaining the
intricacies of everything that was happening in the visible world around us, as opposed
to Literature’s endless discourses that desperately searched the hidden recesses of seemingly troubled minds, only to resurface without any verifiable solutions.
As a result, I was always a huge disappointment to my parents. Whenever their friends
visited, they would instantly call out my sister to come and recite the impossibly long
stanzas of incomprehensible poetry, desperately trying to conceal my discomforting trophies won at Inter-school Science Quizzes or National Mathematics Olympiads. I can’t
say how they never realised that the more they forced me to become inclined towards
fiction, the more I hated it. After all, they had always loved it much more than me. They
were more proud of their publications and literary accomplishments than they were
(or ever could be) of me. I was just an embarrassment to them. They were ashamed of
my interest in Science and Mathematics, subjects that they had always considered their
nemesis. They were like the arch angels supporting God in his battle against Sin, and I
was just a soldier in the army of the Fallen Angels led by Satan. They were always trying
to ‘convert’ me against my will, gifting me literary classics on every important occasion
like birthdays, or Christmas. On my 12th birthday, they finally killed, rather destroyed,
any chances of my ever liking literature by gifting me a copy of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia
Woolf. I didn’t understand a single word of the book, and the day I discarded it, I knew I
was also throwing away the last strands of even a feigned interest in my parents’ obsession.
Since then, days dragged on rather unpleasantly, with the tussle between my parents and
me getting more and more disastrous with each passing day. Coming home every day
was like a nightmare. I was losing interest in everything around – school, music, sports,
movies, books, people – and life seemed little more than a painful burden. Then, one fine
Saturday, a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, life surprised me. The Bloomsbury
Group decided to hold a carnival-of-sorts at our place to commemorate something supposedly special that I obviously had no concern for. All of us were required to dress up like
Authors/Poets and enact one scene either inspired by their biography, or of any popular
piece of fiction they had written. Our parts were decided through a (un)lucky draw, which
was carefully carried out on that fateful Saturday.
When my turn came, I nonchalantly picked up a chit from the huge bowl, to humour
my parents – well actually, to avoid creating a scene in front of all their friends, for once.
My chit said ‘Sylvia Plath’. I clearly had no clue who she was, but somehow, I found her
name extremely enigmatic. It sounded absolutely beautiful. Why didn’t my parents name
me Sylvia? I wondered, as I carefully folded the piece of paper and kept it in the pocket of
my blazer. We left the party cordially, as usual, and reached home at three in the morning,
after surviving immensely dense traffic, and another wav