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                   CHAPTER 9
 
Four Eulogies

The idea for this story started off as a challenge!  Can I develop a character through others describing the person?  At one point in time I had given up and thought of dropping this story from the collection.  But, at the insistence of my editor, Beth, I revamped the entire story but kept the central theme.

This story & 'The Rabbit Hole' are my attempts to bring forth the marital situation of a man getting into an extra-marital affair and creating an unusual set of responses by his family members.  The idea was to stay away from the usual and common responses of fights and divorce, that we hear about most of the time, and to highlight the fact that there maybe people out there who would  respond to such situations in a very different way.


Extract:

He wanted to be cremated, and the only two people present at his cremation were Suzy and his daughter, Bindi. It was said that he wanted his ashes to be divided into four equal parts and to be sprinkled over New York City in New York, Yosemite in California, the Himalayas in India, and the Serengeti in Africa. The majority of his family members and relatives, including his wife, Asta, and his son, Manu, thought that he may have turned senile by the time he wrote those instructions.


In the last few years, he had gone through a metamorphosis, and it all happened after he met Suzy. He didn’t publicize his affair or try to keep it a secret from any one. For him it just happened and became a part of his life from that day forward. His affair became the “talk of the town,” so to speak, because no one could understand the reasons why he fell for that kind of a thing despite the fact that he had an excellent family life and a promising career that paid a hand-some amount of money. Most of his family members firmly believed that it was just a mid-life crisis, and that it would be over in a couple of years, but that never happened. Strangely, he never asked for a divorce or changed his devotion, love, and affection toward his family a bit! His relatives were certain that it was his perfect cover up, but he never bothered to explain or justify his actions.


I Have *
Splinters
The Change
Introspection *
Tete-e-tete
Soldier
Darkness *
Snowstorm
Four Eulogies
Full Circle *
The Rabbit Hole
Intersection
To Love *
She
The Truth Club
Misfit *
Conversation
* Poem
 
 
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