A quick tale 209

Lament

God knows what I’m doing here, standing in the middle of the bedroom like this! If I had it my way, it’d have been so different. None of this drama and certainly not this violence! I’m a peace-lover and you know it. You’ve seen me for so long. Tell me, have I ever lost my cool? Even under the most extreme provocations, I’ve been level-headed all throughout. Like when he hit me when I was six months pregnant over some minor misdemeanour on my part. You saw how I handled that situation. And that incident when my parents lost the plot when I told them that I was going to marry him inspite of everything. Again, you were witness to my grace under fire. And if you cast your mind way back to when I was first introduced to you as a 11-year old who’d just broken her mother’s prized antique vase, you remember how calmly I’d gathered all the shards and presented them to my mother with much apologies as her ‘former vase’.

Now, after one episode after another of presenting me as the cool-headed one who always had her wits about her, how could he make me do something so uncharacteristic as to shoot my husband? I bet, in the coming chapters he’ll say something like ‘momentary madness’ or ‘years of pent up frustration that was uncorked in an unguarded moment’. These writers will think of some clever turn of phrase to justify my actions and you will put down this book never having noticed any aberration in my character. Oh well, there’s not much I can do now. My revolver is loaded (God! Quelle drama!) and the lever is cocked. I make my way across the dark bedroom. I find him asleep in bed and smoothly place the barrel against him temple…