# The Funeral of Bondage The old man had been walking for three days without sleep. His feet, cracked and bleeding, had long stopped sending signals to his brain. The road stretched endlessly—a grey ribbon unwinding through a landscape he no longer recognized. He didn't know when he had decided to leave. Or perhaps it wasn't a decision at all. Decisions require a self, and he had ceased to be himself the day his daughter stopped calling him *abba*. She had started calling him *sir*. Even then, he had waited. Waited for the slip, the small betrayal that would restore him to fatherhood. It never came. The house—that monument to duty—now stood behind him like a monument to failure. Thirty-seven years of waking at five, of tending the garden, of mending broken hinges and broken silences. Thirty-seven years of being needed for the wrong reasons: for the electricity bill, for the neighbor's complaint, for the ancestral name. Never for love. Or so he had come to believe. His grandson had asked him once, while sitting on his lap: "Grandfather, why do you never smile?" He had smiled then—a terrible, honest smile—and said nothing. Now, on this road that led nowhere in particular, he felt something like relief. The bondage of being essential had finally snapped. No one was waiting for him to come home. No one would notice when he didn't. The sun was setting. He sat by a roadside dhaba where a boy was serving tea from a blackened kettle. The tea was bitter, the cup chipped, the boy's eyes kind without expectation. For the first time in decades, the old man wept. Not from sorrow, but from the strange grace of being forgotten. "Will you eat something, uncle?" the boy asked. The old man looked at him—this stranger with gentle hands—and nodded. It was a small thing, this acceptance of sustenance. But it felt like a beginning. Outside, the road continued into darkness, indifferent and free.

My heart is light today, sun-bright. Here I was, drowning in unrest just a moment ago; the days pile it higher and higher, neglect compounds, sometimes my insides twist themselves raw—but I hardly care anymore about any of it.

There's so much I can't bring myself to tell you, held back by some modesty I can't shake. I don't even know what you write, or to whom, or why—but that not-knowing is my peace. All my hurts drift away.

You might think me absurdly foolish. I can't think much these days, and I don't bother trying. I take what feels good and leave the rest. If something dark threatens, I set it aside. I know now—there is no negativity anywhere. Even my grudges have gone. I don't want to put distance between us over anything; I just want to hold on and live.

Let me tell you about my troubles. A lifetime of sacrifice, of swallowing and accepting—I think it's twisted something in me. Since my son was born, they say I've become temperamental, stubborn as a stone. So everyone—my mother, my siblings, my husband—everyone close to me keeps saying I'm bad. To earn their love I have to be good, docile, the picture of a dutiful wife. My husband, his family, all of them together pick me apart.

The thing is, I understand it all now. But I can't take their love anymore. Love that demands you play the dutiful wife—I don't want it. I'm trying to become harder, fiercer, because I've come to despise them. I need to get out, and fast.

Beneath all this lies something deeper still. Some people want me to fail, to suffer—they're laughing at my misery. I don't have the strength to fight them anymore; now my war is with the ones I call my own.

In the end, I'm utterly alone. The child exhausts me; I can't eat properly, can't sleep, can't do anything, my body won't hold. I don't know if anything will ever be right again.

Everything ends in meaninglessness—and yet today's sunset is beautiful. Seeking meaning in an illogical world—it's humanity's most logical madness.

...I read something like this somewhere, and it echoed with my own thoughts. In me, both waiting and faith burn bright. Someone will wait for you, perhaps till death. Has anyone ever given you more than that?

I won't come back. There's no one waiting for me anywhere. I have love for no one. I despise everything. You too. If any feeling for me still lives in you, then perform its funeral rites and be free. Let yourself go.