Oh, how I turned insensitive to his growing-up needs. What an irony it is that I started neglecting him striving for his own good! Now the gulf seems to be too wide to attempt to even bridge it. And won’t it feel odd to befriend an adolescent son in a U-turn? Hope his JDs would come to pass as he comes of age. How I wish he gets the right wife to rectify my motherly wrong.

Won’t I give my life for S if that were needed? He may never know how I love him, but how does that matter if he’s contented and happy, unlike us, his parents? How I love to see him happily married. Having no emotional dependence on him as a mother, I might make a marvelous mother-in-law to his wife. Well, everything in life seems to have a flip side to it, doesn’t it?'

'What a shock on the New Year's Eve! Whoever expected it? How sad that some girl paid with her life for the ruffled psyche of my son! Am I not the real culprit behind it? Oh, how can I atone for all this! I am not able to think, let alone write, anymore now.'

As his eyes welled up with tears and his heart filled with love for her by then, Suresh couldn’t go through the rest of Sneha’s outpour. Slowly he began shredding her diaries as he didn’t like them to see the light at dawn. And putting the shreds in a bucket of water to turn them into pulp, he vowed to carry her secrets to his grave. When he left the room having bowed before her portrait, he felt that neither his mother could be blamed nor his father be faulted for whatever happened.