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Victim of Trust
Next day, Dhruva woke up earlier than usual to Radha’s thoughts, and sipping the bed-coffee in the portico, as he thought about the inimical twists and turns in her chequered life, he had a gut feeling that it was she, who came to see him the other day. What with his earlier fascination for the alleged murderess coming to the fore again, he was seized with an urge to see her. While he was lost in his thoughts, as Dicey began to bark, he looked towards the gate, and seeing a fascinating dame, he seemingly lost his heart to her, but bitten once, even as she approached him seductively he subdued himself. Just the same, when she introduced herself as Radha, he couldn’t resist holding out his hand to her, but as she offered her services to him, he wanted to have her resume, before he made up his mind.
Radha was the only child of her parents, who pampered her much beyond their middle-class means. She was rather studious and methodical and even excelled at her studies that is relatively speaking, and to the delight of his parents, she was on expected academic course to be a Chartered Accountant. However, when she crossed eighteen, her life went awry, as she lost her heart to a newcomer in their locality, whose identity she preferred not to reveal, as the world was small after all. What with love ruling her head, she failed to apply her mind at her studies to end up at the bottom of the class, and her father, who entertained visions of seeing her in the ‘Brahmaiah’ mould, was aghast at her poor showing. When he wanted her to explain her low scores, she spilled the beans, and that left him with no choice but to approach her lover’s father, who roundly condemned her for enticing his gullible son and outraged by the slur, her father prohibited her from meeting her lover any more.
However, as her lover assured her that he would prevail over his father, blinded by love, she carried on with him on the sly, but as her escapades came to her father’s notice, he restricted her movements, and started looking for a suitable boy for her. While the prospect of her marriage with another alarmed her, and as her lover too was averse to losing her, they eloped, when she was barely nineteen. While that made her scandalized parents disown her, her lover’s parents were engaged in weaning their son away from her.
Her lover’s will to stick to her through thick and thin began to wane as he came to wilt under the emotional blackmail of his parents, which forced her to remind him of his own vows never to part with her. When she was thus hard-pressed to hold her lover, his father upped the ante by pitting his son’s mediocre life with her against the rosy future as the son-in-law of a well-heeled man with a vivacious daughter. While the parent-induced insecurity played upon his mind and the envisaged beauty of the bride-to-be blunted her own charms in his vision, her lover came to perceive her as a source of his own undoing. As if the prospect of losing her lover was not nightmarish enough, she missed her periods, regardless of which, he chose to desert her, and that sealed her fate. Left in the lurch, as she burnt her bridges with her parents, so she thought, she in desperation, tried to contact her childhood friend, her full-soul mate her half-namesake, as she put it.