Short Story with Moral Lesson – My Son Who Went Away
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My family,my life,I was a happy women, I was Rita Deshpande.I had a perfect life,a loving husband,a stressful but an economically and socially rewarding job as a lawyer in a corporate law firm and two beautiful children.Jayesh my husband and myself both of us were very ambitious,we always felt that any individual was always known and only known on the basis of his work and what kind of work an individual did.So it was natural for us to try and bring about that very same ambition to succeed in life into our children's lives,maybe we were over-ambitious,because this very ambition turned my life upside down.
I had two beautiful kids (breaks into tears) Shahid and Pallavi. Shahid being the elder of the two children, he was a happy go lucky kid, he was a dreamer, by this i mean he had a entire world of fantasy around him, because of which he could write very well. He had a awesome sense of imagination and humour which he would put down on paper and would submit to various competitions and would always win or would atleast get noticed. He was also good in sports and very famous in school, he was an average student academically. Once he came to me and said
“Mom I want to become a writer, i want to join the arts streams, i want to be a writer” he had said these words, i as his mother remembered clearly, but we never took him seriously. We somehow convinced him to take up the commerce stream after the s.s.c examinations, he listened to us then.
Now he was seventeen and had just cleared his standard 12th, now was the time when he had to choose which stream of education he wanted to enter, I insisted that he joined law as it was an upcoming and a very lucrative ,even my husband who was a successful businessman agreed, but my son he still wanted to be a writer. He did not want to become some rich lawyer or doctor or some famous architect. He wanted to pursue his dreams. He wanted to become a writer, he put his foot down and did not budge.
We did not budge either, we told him if he wanted become a writer he could do so as an hobby while as a career he did not have an option other than law. He did not say a word because we told we did not want to hear anything. We made him join a good law school. In the first he had a good score but in the second year his grades started to fall. He seemed to be less and less interested in his studies and life in general. We tried talking to him, it did not work. On the 12th of august 2011, he was found hanging from the cieling fan of our so called “spacious” home by his two shell-shocked parents. Suddenly it started to dawn upon us the reason why he took this step.
Now two years later, my daughter Pallavi who just passed her standard 10th asked us
“Mum what should i become” .
We told her “do what your heart tells you to”
I saw that smile on her face and started to cry, she hugged as if she exactly knew why I was crying, probably she did.
(this is a work of fiction)
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