Dear Love,

I hope you’re happy now. You have your mum with you. She always did love you more than me, I hope she is happy, too. I tried as much as I could to be you, I hope she thought it was good enough.

Last night I woke up, unable to breathe and with a pounding in my chest, not wanting to go on. Wanting to be with you both, more desperately than you can imagine. But as soon as I went downstairs, I heard the same jargon over and over again. ‘ Jab Diya maregee to…from natural or unnatural causes’.’ After hearing it for fourteen years and especially over the past six days, something inside me just snapped. The only person who never stood for this madness, is gone.

‘Ab to hum bilkul bhi nahin marenge!’ SB told SC. ‘ You wait, let me handle them and then you come out. Cry later, grieve later. I got to first keep us alive!’ Then I did something, I normally never do. I ordered plenty of meds and took them to ensure, I would be fine. I wish I could be with you guys right now…I wish I could sit by the side of the Dal and cry, the way I did when GD left. I wish I could sit there and pray for Mom, the way I have for you a zillion times. I wish I had a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold. But right now, I just have myself, unwell and more broken than ever, with people wishing me to be dead.

But I will be damned, if I let anyone convince me that I need to apologise for being a woman. I will be damned if I let anyone convince me, to crawl up in a corner and die. I will be damned if I allow anyone to tell me to shift to another city, so that they can get complete possession. I thought it was yours and I wouldn’t have gotten it any case. So, I thought let it happen, why should I stop it? But this incessant need to have me dead…I will be damned if the number of drinks two men consume, will become the deciding factor, of what happens to my mother’s memory.

God knows, I need to keep it together because this shit just got real!