A light morning breeze stroked her face, wet with tears, as she sat in the balcony thinking about the relations.
“Any relations based upon trust, humanity, compassion and empathy is way better than blood relations. At least we do not have the need to carry the burden of the hypocrisy and narrow-minded philosophies of our blood relatives. If we don’t like something, we can break up with our friends, love or husband but we can’t break up with our blood relatives. We can move on, leaving everything behind, in every other relation but we can’t move on when it comes to blood relations.”
She recalled how her father taught her humanity, equity and equality and now he is telling her to be concerned about their community, their religion. Now he is against her secular ideas and outlook. He says, “You are not realistic and practical. All these things look good in preaching books and romantic novels”.
And after that incident he always asks the surname of her friends, even if she is a girl. Last time, she presented her thoughts before him and got a blunt reply, “You are free to think whatever you want to now, but later you have to mould yourself to the customs of our society. The sooner it is, the easier it will be. I don’t want any of my girls to be out of our community.”
She thought about these words; “What if he is not able to find someone equal to my calibers? What if I have to compromise with a person less respectable than me? Why am I achieving so much if I will not be able to do anything of my choice; anything to change the society for good?...”
She knew that her father and mother’s families were business rivals. There were feuds quite often and they have to hire bodyguards and advocates almost every time. Some common family friends and well wishers suggested to establish marriage relations to put an end to all these feuds. She said to herself, “Papa himself witnessed the advantage of establishing conjugal relations between rivals. He know how marriage can erase the line of difference between two families, then why he can’t understand that establishing conjugal relations between two communities can also eradicate the line of communal difference.”
Alarm clock rang, indicating that it is 6 A.M. She put a halt to the thought process and stood up. But she felt like a culprit. She is guilty that she thought against her father, afterall she has a BLOOD RELATION with him.
