July/August 2009

INTRODUCTION First of all, you must know that my story is not unique. It’s merely the same tale as millions, maybe even billions of human beings; a few thousand hearts broken every day the same way as my life was shattered. Shattered but able to be put back together, piece by piece. But keeping that in mind, this narration is not a happy one. It was the worst thing in my short life, and that life was in a ruin for a while. They say that for every good thing that happens, a bad, awful, miserable thing appears in the same story. Same story, same life. That’s the way they say it. But I take it the other way. I say the opposite; for every bad thing a good thing appears. I am not responsible for my life, my story, but no doubt I have changed it—after all, a writer is the owner, and the changer of his book, is he not? Change. A meaningful word, and rarely used correctly. Change makes things what they are; change creates, preserves and destroys everything. Everything except change itself. I have made up a phrase, and it is one of the few things to say and not be heard, only understood. “In every darkness shines a light within it.” That simple sentence is so complex because of its truth. I believe that in every life it is prominent. It is there, and in the light in the darkness there is another darkness, a smaller but darker one, in which there is a tiny but dazzling light, in which another even smaller darkness… and so on. My father had been working on his book for as long as I could remember But my story is not just light and darkness. It is also love and the breaking of love. It is, to name the affliction that blessed my life, my parents’ love that broke, and when the love broke, the people broke apart from each other, and that led to the creation of many things, including a small baby who is now almost fifteen months, a love between five people that could never be broken, even if the previous time my mother had a love that could not be broken it broke. I am sure, with every atom in my being, that the love we have now will be whole forever. Before I embark on the specifics of my tale, this must be known: I do not know, nor want to know, all of what happened in my parents’ marriage that made them miserable. I assume I will find out in later years, and tears will fall from my eyes again, and the grief that I had will be reborn, though I do not know if it will be greater or smaller than my grief when the breaking of the love appeared in my life. Because the love had broken before I knew it, but I was unknowing, and ignorance was a blessing. But sometimes I noticed small things, which leaked out like a hole in a faulty pipe, and I wondered. Thankfully, however, my small mind passed those things over without a second thought. But they were still there, and unknowingly I was scared. *          *          * CHAPTER ONE BEFORE My father had been working on his book for as long as I could remember. In total, it took seven years. Much more time then he had been allotted by his publishers. The book had somewhat shaped my early childhood, and if not that, it had somewhat shaped my father, and of course, I was shaped by my father tremendously. I remember clearly, how he used to sit there in his study all day, how after school I would come home, go to his office, talk to him about my day, and then I would leave, and he would be there for the rest of the day, and he came out at dinnertime, and he would cook, and I would eat, and I would talk, and then go to sleep. In the time after I had my after-school chat with him and before my dinner, I would be with my mother. We might go to a movie, or work on an art project, or go to a park, or do whatever activities a mother does with a child. My father would be uninvolved, and I would wonder what he was doing there, in his study, working all day. But of course, I know now. He was making money, the money which bought me an elite private-school education, the money that paid the health insurance, the day-to-day money that bought me ice creams after school, the money that paid the babysitter, the money that bought my clothes—all the expenses were bought by him sitting in his study, working all day. And often he would go on trips to places around the world, to India, the place where his book took place, for as long as two months. I remember how I and my brother tried to Scotch-tape the door shut, to stop him from going, and the Welcome Back signs we used to make for him. You see, we loved him. He was not very involved with the family, but we loved him just as much as any son could love a father. And yet, we were scared of him. He was frustrated with money, and money was what he had to sacrifice everything for, and money was a curse. And he had a temper, because a man who is frustrated with what he does, who finds life so hard, a man cannot keep all those rages bottled up inside him. He got mad, and we silently got mad too, but we were too scared to voice our anger. But we didn’t know the reasons, we didn’t know how hard life was for him, we didn’t know how much he loved us and how much he did for us, and we should have