“Wonder how success eclipses one’s innate goodness?”

“What if she weighed me light in comparison with someone more successful?” he continued. “As I was bogged down with that thought, the negativity of it began to bother me; I was alive to the fact that the seeds of liaisons sprout in the stilted minds of the disaffected spouses, and if Ruma were to take a lover, the slight apart, won’t the scandal be scary. What if she chose to seduce Anand to score over me and still keep it in the family; but soon as if to relieve me of my worry, like I distanced myself from Raju before, she came to cold-shoulder Anand, but for a different reason; while I avoided Raju imagining that I had outgrown him, I suspect that she began to shun Anand to disown her humble past. How ironical it was that her moral decline should’ve assuaged my fears about her feared sexual fall; whatever, as if they served their purpose, my unfounded fears about her affection for him were put to rest in my mind.”

“Wasn’t it rank depravity that you should have felt relieved even though your wife had lost her soul? What a fall though it’s a folly to judge others.”

“Whatever, I toyed with the idea of roping him into my venture for I began to feel the need for someone capable that I could trust as well,” he continued. “What a value addition he had been at the office, and ironically that hastened my moral decline even more; as he refused to soil his hands with our murky deals, I had to handle the underbelly of business that heralded my nose-dive into a moral abyss; and equally worse, Imperial’s vertical take-off into the galaxy of infrastructure only pushed Ruma’s moral ethos further down the ladder of materialistic callousness. So, in the process of his growing up, Satish’s psyche had to bear the brunt of our moral fall; well, who to blame but me for denying him what was left of the childhood for the kids of his generation?”

“Why blame yourself when it was and is the order of the day?”

“Do you think so?” he said looking at me vacantly.




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