“Being an underling to the leader is not the way to build a political career,” she thought. “Won’t my life illustrate that?”
She was poor being a dalit and spirited in spite of it. She was attractive by birth and sophisticated by education, both of which enabled her to marry Shekhar, a wheeler-dealer. With a prosperous husband and two cute children, a boy and a girl, when she thought she had nothing more to ask for, fate gave a political twist to her life. As it happened, alive to the caste arithmetic in the electoral calculus, her man reckoned that it’s only time before the middle-aged Saran of the leftist party would be catapulted to the pole position. So, he began investing in Saran. What with Saran well on course, as Shekhar began to up his stakes, she got sucked into the vortex. When Saran proposed to take her under his political wings, Shekhar had seen in that a second string to his business bow. But life seems to have had other ideas.
As her political proximity with Saran occasioned their personal intimacy, she was thrown into a dilemma at the lakshman rekha. Bogged down at the threshold, she chanced to hear a successful woman politician’s public confession that it’s a fair game for women to use their personal assets for a sexual climb on the political ladder. While men have all the means to reign in the political arena, so went the wannabe woman’s argument, only by conceding her sexual space to the powers that be that women can gain political ground. With that ‘sane’ advice putting her in the family way for the third time, though on a non-family path, she gave birth to Rohan and that changed the equation of her life and the equilibrium of her mind. What with Saran becoming fond of his only son - he had two daughters from his wife - their liaison began to acquire the colours of a union making her dread about the prospect of her man getting wind of it sooner than later. Butthat fateful day ended her torment.
Shekhar was driving here and her kids in their Sokda to make it to a relative’s wedding when Saran called him as they were midway and wanted her to take an urgent political call at Jhula, which, he hoped they hadn’t as yet passed through. So, she broke her journey along with infant Rohan and made it to Saran but Shekhar and her other children couldn’t reach their destination, owing to a head-on collision. Saran felt though sad it was a welcome development. It was sooner than later that Shekhar would’ve got wind of their peccadilloes and then wouldn’t he have vented his pique in public. So, his sudden demise precluded their political ruin, and her paramour’s reasoning made her suspect his hand behind her man’s death, which the discreet closure of the matter by police as a hit and run case had only confirmed. Yet, she didn’t bear a grudge as he made her his mistress and treated Rohan as his son and more so entrusted all his unaccounted wealth with her. But promising to lead her into the legislative council without facing the heat and dust at the hustings, he put paid to her budding grassroots political career. So she bided for her time as he rose in the party hierarchy.