Prism Part 2 - Neetha Rajesh

I feel like a queen. Rajesh is the kindest soul in the world! He treats me like I'm royalty. Every morning, he tells me that I'm beautiful. He showers me with presents. My every need is fulfilled in this house. Well, every need that he is capable of fulfilling. He may treat me like a delicate flower but his family, not so much.

We live with his parents. His sister Maya is a year older than me but I call her by her name because by status, I'm her elder brother's wife, her superior. She pretends to be a saint before everyone else but she's not fooling me with her back-handed compliments and snide remarks. She always manages to get on my nerves and I can't stand her for the life of me. Every time she opens her mouth, all I want to do is slap her face the way I slapped that girl in college.

Maya is married to one of those rich prospective grooms that had rejected me in the past. A few weeks before my wedding, when Maya's husband and his family figured out who Rajesh was marrying, they called up my in-laws to tell them that I was in no way a good match for their son. Maya's husband even wrote Rajesh a letter, explaining that his family had done some digging into my past and had discovered that I had been a "loose woman" in college and that I had quite a scandalous nickname too. By then, Rajesh had already met me a couple of times and we spoke on the phone every other day. He knew me, and trusted me. He had already promised his heart to me. And being a man true to his word, neither did he pay any heed to those accusations, nor did he even pause to reconsider. He married me with his head held high and later, even shared the letter with me, reassuring me that he didn't believe a word in it.

Recently, Maya's husband who thought I wasn't good enough for him because my father was not as rich as his, got an offer to work in Dubai. But the thing is, his rich father who passed away a few months before my wedding, had left behind such a humongous debt that his poor son had to sell everything the family owned to get out of it. And now that fate offered him a job abroad so that he could finally begin to pull his family out the mess his departed father left behind, he can't even afford his fight tickets to Dubai. That poor, poor thing. His wings have been clipped, and his flight has quite literally been delayed.

So, when Maya and her husband came visiting to tell us this sad tale so as to indirectly beg for money, I convinced Rajesh to lend it to them. "After all, what is family for?", I announced to the room while smiling at the games fate likes to play with our lives. Everyone knows that Rajesh always listens to me, and I especially made it known to Maya and her hubby that they owe my husband's generosity to me. They were staying the night so I prepared a tasty meal and we all sat around the dining table chatting and laughing about little nothings. Their dessert however, was served in bed.

I made them a comfortable bed so that they'd sleep well after nostalgically reading through the contents of the letter that they once wrote and I now left on their bed.


Photo credit: Saad.Akhtar via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND