Puja and I

Don't know why but nowadays my mind often reaches back to the past when I was a young woman in America, married, a student's wife and anxious, most of the time. Once Reena-boudi had said in her house, 'Sreemati has such a sad face'.

Today, when I have comparatively so much more, enough academic standing even if not deliriously happy, when I can look at such and such article and say to someone, 'Guess what? I wrote that', those days strike a poignant chord--not so much, 'those days', but that being, Sreemati Mukherjee, aged 22, 23 or 24.

Young, idealistic and very naive. No sense of the world except a burning desire to study. 'Want to study', said my heart all the time. I used to love my husband very much and didn't really doubt it.

At Shop Rite or Food Town, agonizing whether to buy attractive biscuits 20 cents more than the cheapest one. Once, I had paid 1.5 dollars for something someone else had wanted for Christmas and my husband had been so angry.

Lived in a kind of anxious fear all the time.

This blog entry was jogged by the actor in the Netflix series, Affair having gone into a Public Library, somewhere in a small town in America. Because D's grades had been bad in the Fall of 1982, I had sworn not to touch a book for a year. Some sort of Karmic reparation for wanting to know whether my marks for the Part II had increased through Review, the day of his Probability examination.

When in the Fall of 1983, I walked down Hoboken's main thoroughfare, Washington Street, with a spring in my step and eagerness coursing through my entire being. I remember the joy in each step I took, the happy anticipation I felt as I made my way to Hoboken's Public Library.