Enough

3

In all the weeks she had spent trying to hide the truth about her marriage to Abhi, Pragya had forgotten one basic thing.

Her mother had a temper.

Pragya's had decided to stay in her marriage after the distrastrous first night because she had overheard her mother worrying about her future. Along with the memory of Maa's frightening collapse when she had tried to break her engagement to Abhi, it reminded her of the way Maa had broken down when her alliances ended with Suresh and Tarun. It had been a year full of drama for their family, and her mother's health and happiness always the cost.

But for all that Maa had recently tended to react to bad news with desperate sadness, she was still the same fierce-spirited woman she had always been. She was the same woman who had stood up to customers trying to cheat her out of payment over decades of running her marriage hall, the same woman who had argued with merchants trying to give her inferior goods, the same woman who had walked away from valuable business deals when asked to do something unethical.

And she was the same mother who had ruled over Pragya and Bulbul's childhood with a spine of steel and a golden heart. She was the same mother who had scolded Pragya for hours when she was late handing in an end-of-term assignment because she was too busy helping Bulbul, and the same mother who had punished Bulbul's first and only lie about skipping school classes by forcing her to take extra tuition in her free time.

Sarla Arora had indeed grown anxious and hysterical with age. But she had not lost her instinctive temper, as Pragya was finding out in what had to be the most painful conversation she had ever had with her mother.

"I just don't understand, how could you think THIS would make me happy?" Maa asked for the third time. She hadn't yet given Pragya a chance to answer, instead repeating over and over what she'd been told, clearly unable to believe it.

"Maa, I just wanted to -"

"Really Pragya, really? Is this what I taught you your whole life, to hide your pain from me? To try to solve all the problems in the world without once looking to see if someone could help?"

"Maa, after what happened to your health when you found out about Suresh -"

"You thought I was too weak, didn't you? You thought I couldn't handle the truth. You thought that the mother who took care of you for your whole life has become so weak and useless that there's no need to tell her the truth!"

"But Maa -"

"Pragya, I never thought you could disappoint me like this. You are supposed to be my understanding daughter. How could you think that making sacrifices and playing pretend would fix anything? Don't you see, Pragya, those people are so selfish and wicked that there was never anything you could have done to make that marriage real!"

Pragya was shocked at her mother's words. Suddenly, she felt the vault of pain buried in her heart unlock. She had known all this time that none of it was her fault, at least not in the beginning; the situation with Aaliya and Abhi was not of her making. Nonetheless, she had kept trying to cover it up and fix it and plan and hope for things to somehow work out. To finally have someone tell her that she had been foolish to even think it was a problem that she could solve gave Pragya a relied she hadn't known she needed.

"Maa!" she breathed shakily, unable to put her sudden gratitude into words.

Maa extended her arms, and Pragya gratefully fell into her embrace. She lay her head on her mother's chest and cried like the silly teenager she had never quite allowed herself to be. As the first wave of sobs slowed down, she started to tell Maa all the little details of her complicated experience at Mehra Mansion. She told her about the ugly moments with Tanu, and Abhi's habit of blaming her for nonsensical things, and Aaliya's never-ceasing unpleasantness. She told her about how sweet yet blind Daadi and the Daasis were, how inexplicable Mithali Bhabhi was, how much she was growing attached to Bunty and Babli.