What Fortune Decrees

Thirty-six years ago today, Konka got married in the early days of the monsoon season, under the quota of "may-the-girl-grow-tall." Since then, every year during the rains, memories of the wedding and the beginning of a new life come flooding back to Konkabati.

Konka had passed her Intermediate exams with a decent result. What she would do next—she never got the chance to think it through properly. Even before entering married life, her mother had explained to her four times a day that thinking about such things was now completely pointless!

Every day, so many people came saying "We want to see the new bride, we want to see the new bride" that the number of her red saris kept multiplying beyond count. A house full of red saris, hands full of bangles, and plates full of red and white sweets—these three things seemed bound together in some unbreakable routine.

After scrutinizing Konka for long stretches, almost everyone would say, "But the bride is quite tall!" This comment gave everyone in her in-laws' house a chance to be happy, while Konka would sit and think that besides being tall, she had been born into this world with so many other qualities too!

Her mother used to worry because she painted pictures, her elder brother worried because she would lose herself reading poetry. But one afternoon, in a gathering full of bride-viewers, when Konka was requested to sing, she ended up performing a Rabindra Sangeet. With her head bowed, she wondered that day exactly how many people in her in-laws' house she had frightened! Yet before the song had even ended, her mother-in-law and several others had burst into applause.

She couldn't figure out why this happened. Because everyone in her father's house had said that knowing songs, poetry, and painting instead of cooking meant Konka would never be able to manage a household. Yet the routine her mother-in-law had established—listening to Rabindra Sangeet from her every afternoon and poetry recitations every Friday—continued unchanged until the day before her mother-in-law's death.

Now, in her old age, Konkabati thinks that most of her parents' anxieties were needless. If they hadn't imposed these groundless worries on her, Konka could have managed her household with even more color, beauty, and heart.