Uncategorized | 3min Read
Published on May 14, 2026
Fruitful Life?
Fruitful Life?
Everyone was in the veranda, murmuring with jars of ostentatious liquid—
“chai.” In
her room, all locked up, Anvie was crying profusely. The tears made the cornea of
her eyes glisten, in which she
saw the trail of memories, retaining daughter-mother synergy.
****
It was the death anniversary of Anvie’s mother. The house was submerged in dead
silence, consuming each soul, just like an eddying brook consumes the banks of its
sustenance.
Passing through this unwanted vacuum, Anvie’s grandmother, Arka, a soberly
flamboyant lady with a peacock walk, reached her room. All stacked-up emotions
turned messy and scattered when Anvie saw her grandmother arrive, an allegory of
modesty to her. Arka compelled Anvie to come with her on the terrace. Like a
peacock with its feathers spread all around and curling with their weight, capturing
the unstable raindrop in the downpour, Arka picked up Anvie and took her to the
terrace. At the terrace, Arka plucked a flower from the adjacent tree and placed it
into a diary she brought along with her. The action of plucking appeared stiff, like
the thorny stems of the rose. Then, she recited the poem to her granddaughter,
with an amalgam of the cacophony of the nearby crow and cricket. She narrated,
“This poem was written by your mother:
“A flower of a pious child
From a fetus of bud
To the toddler of peaceful naivety
Where it slowly got cut from the umbilical cord.
The flower in its adolescence
Admired the pretty Polly natives
It was when he was the most capable of the incapable.
Amending nature’s greatest laws.Alas! It happened over a long time.
That flower introverted into a fruit….”
Anvie delved into her own mystic thoughts and instinctively turned the pages
around, as a new sense of hope and teaching had hit her heart like a cupid, pouring
wisdom and respectful love into her body like a vessel, and the abruption disrupted
that flow. At the end of the diary, she saw an embroidered cloth hidden in the
diary’s secret pocket. With drooling blood, it was written:
“Fruitful was its disguise.
For peeling, it would be left damaged.
Dear this natural addiction,
Made the rotten hearts unpleasant
Fell on the ground
Stepped upon by a peasant.”
The lines left Anvie horrified. Tears and hands with smeared dry blood marked all
parts of the page, and the title of the poem was imprinted as the ink bloated—
“Fruitful Life?” The
The interrogative title changed its whole significance. The peaceful peacock hurried
its walk to catch its prey, which slacks, piercing through its entrails. The
grandmother pushed Anvie off the railing; as she fell to the floor, the body was
radiating “Et tu, Brute?” The brook of blood, seeping into the porous rocks, made
the patriarchy bloom. Anvie’s mother was murdered by her in-laws for creating
‘retaliating’ pieces of poetry and not fettering herself into the shackles of
stereotype. This was the reason why she manipulated her last piece of poetry,
showing how her life had been devoid of that Arka (nectar in Punjabi).
All the evidence was removed, and Anvie’s corpse was laid close to the pyre of her
mother, for the woven threads of feminism were turned to ashes in the fire.
