Saral never romanticized struggle. She didn’t see her childhood through nostalgia’s soft-focus lens, didn’t call poverty character-building or mislabel pain as poetry. Her memories were unfiltered: rainwater dripping through a rusted tin roof, soaking her secondhand textbooks; the ache of an empty stomach pressed to a cold floor as she tried to memorize the structure of the heart from a borrowed science guide.
Her father, Raghunath, laid bricks by day and dreams by night. A mason, he built homes for others but never finished their own. He wasn’t a man of many words, but his love showed through his hands — in the roti he slipped into her lunchbox, the quiet way he walked barefoot to work so she could have sandals with worn soles. He never said he was proud. He just kept showing up. Kept building. Not just walls, but the fragile scaffolding of her future.
He never once wished for a son.
“Why would I need a son,” he’d laugh, ruffling her hair, “when I already have the fiercest one disguised as my daughter?”
But some nights — when he thought she was asleep — he’d sit by the broken window, knees to his chest, staring into the dark. The silence carried his guilt. Sobs shook his frame as he cradled the shame of not giving her better food, better clothes, better books, a better life. Saral never spoke of it. But she saw it. Always. And in quiet rebellion, she decided: if he wouldn’t complain, she wouldn’t either.
Her mother, Rama, was softer but no less strong. A househelp with a crooked spine and unshaken faith in karma, she wore her pain like a bangle — always visible, always part of her. She never let Saral leave without a whispered prayer. Never let a failure go unsoothed.
“When I was your age,” she’d say, kneeling beside her on the mud floor, “I had dreams too. But I didn’t have you. That makes all the difference.”
Rama believed in waiting — for fate to shift, for time to heal.
“Everything comes if you keep walking,” she’d say, dabbing turmeric on a burn or knotting Saral’s hair before school. “Even luck. Even justice.”
Saral didn’t believe in waiting. Not at first. As a child, she’d whine — for better clothes, a bicycle, sweets from Chandu’s, mangoes in summer.
“Why don’t we have what others have?” she’d ask, chin trembling.
Her mother always smiled, tired but tender. “Because you’re still writing your first chapter, beto. Just wait.”
Saral’s chest tightened. She turned toward the window, unable to meet their eyes. Outside was the same field where she once bloodied her knee on the way to school. Her mother had tied a piece of her pallu around the wound and whispered, “You fall, you get up. That’s all we know.”
Now the silence between them ached.
But Saral had long stopped waiting. Stopped complaining. Somewhere between her father’s quiet tears and her mother’s hopeful mantras, she buried her desires deep — underlined them in textbooks, poured them into essays, mapped them across chemistry formulas and outline maps she wasn’t sure she’d ever see.
Instead of asking, she started doing.
She began tutoring neighborhood kids after school, standing on upturned crates to scribble alphabets on soot-darkened walls. She learned computers and taught weekend classes at a dusty learning center. Every rupee she earned was folded carefully and pressed between the pages of her dream: to become a doctor.
Not for pride. Not even for service. But for freedom.
She studied like someone possessed — not by ambition, but by the absence of choice.
Her village, with its tamarind trees and red soil, held a beauty that outsiders admired. But for Saral, it was a trap wrapped in nostalgia. A place where girls got married at fifteen and stopped speaking in full sentences. Where boys fled to the city and returned only to mock the land that raised them. Where dreams were considered polite lies you told children until they learned better.
Saral never learned better. She chose not to.
And so, while her peers talked of Bollywood songs and cricket scores, Saral chased mitochondria and Mendel’s laws.
~ Between Hunger and Survival
After failing the entrance exam miserably on her first attempt — ranking somewhere so far down the list it felt like a rejection letter from the universe itself — Saral told herself she was done. But then she tried again. On her second attempt, she missed the qualifying marks by just two two marks that lived in her body like phantom bruises. She memorized the names of those who had cleared, stared at their ranks, wondering what two marks felt like to them. Did they know what they had earned or rather stolen?
But she didn’t cry. She never cried. Not when she failed, not when she passed.
When the results came in the third time — the last time, because she had no more savings, no more years to spare — she didn’t jump or scream or fall to her knees like the girls she had watched in motivational videos. She sat still on the edge of her cot, staring at the screen until the numbers burned into her retina.
Her name. Her roll number. A scholarship.
She was going to be a doctor.
The first one.
From her village.
From a bloodline that had only known labor, superstition, and sacrifice.
As her phone buzzed with messages — from well-wishers, teachers, neighbors — she didn’t touch it. Her fists were clenched, her throat dry. The victory felt too large to swallow. Like food after a long famine. Like joy that arrives only after you’ve forgotten what joy feels like.
But success didn’t feel like euphoria.
It felt like survival.
Saral wasn’t sure if she was still in the first chapter of life, the one her Mai always spoke of — the one where you wait for the story to begin.
All she knew was that somewhere between borrowed notebooks and skipped meals, she had stumbled into a different book altogether — the later chapters of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest.
And she had survived.
Not gracefully. Not unscarred.
But utterly, undeniably — she had survived. And that, too, was a kind of triumph.
The city was another planet. At her government medical college, Saral was assigned a top-bunk bed in a twelve-girl hostel room that smelled of wet towels and ambition. Girls sauntered in with sleek hair and matching loungewear, armed with iPads and words she’d only seen in textbooks — toner, gluten, serum, credit cards, black coffee, Sunday brunch.
Saral walked in with oil-stained notebooks, a steel tiffin box, and a hunger no one could see.
In class, she spoke only when asked. But knowledge, she discovered, was an equalizer. She learned fast. Understood faster. She rose to the top of her batch by sheer force — turning fear into fuel. Professors admired her diligence. Her classmates gradually softened, though they never quite knew what to make of her — a girl who said “thank you” too often, owned no lipstick, and never let her guard down, not even at birthday parties.
But Saral was never without conflict.
The hostel mess served four curries a week — too much food, always left over. The first time she took a second helping of rice, her hand hesitated. Her father’s face flashed in her mind — the one he wore while pretending not to be hungry, setting his rotis aside for her. He thought she never noticed. But she did.
She always did.
She'd stare at untouched fruit in the common room and remember how her mother once brought home overripe bananas from her employer’s house, smiling as if they were gold. Or how they once shared stale puris by candlelight — not for mood, but because there was no electricity or gas.
In this new life, food was just… food.
Not a reward. Not a festival.
Not the warm payoff after a day of hauling bricks in scorching or sand in heavy rain.
Not the once-a-year generosity of the privileged, who handed out sweets to the poor as a deal with God — as if feeding someone could double as a prayer.
In her old life, food was sacred. Counted. Shared. Sacrificed.
Here, it was everywhere. She could open a fridge and take anything. Eat until full. Leave leftovers.
And yet, some part of her still flinched every time she reached for an extra roti.
Even when she could finally afford new clothes — a kurta without frayed sleeves, jeans that weren’t hand-me-downs — she picked the simplest one. She went for a haircut once, at her roommate’s insistence, and sat stiff in the salon chair, calculating the cost of every snip in hours of labor back home.
It wasn’t just money that weighed on her. It was permission.
Saral never felt she’d earned rest. If she sat too long at a café, bought an overpriced coffee, or laughed too loudly at a movie, it felt like betrayal — of the girl who once walked barefoot to school on an empty stomach. She didn’t know how to “enjoy,” not like the city girls with their impromptu plans and lazy Sundays.
Every time she tried, a voice whispered:
“Not yet. You haven’t earned it yet.”
Not until the degree.
Not until the job.
Not until she sent money home.
Not until she became someone worthy of ease.
But no one told Saral there’s no perfect time to begin living.
That healing doesn’t arrive with degrees or paychecks.
That joy, if delayed too long, can grow unfamiliar.
~The Village on the Last Page
But weight has many shapes.
For Saral, it often came disguised as achievement — the weight of a scholarship letter, of pride in her parents’ eyes, of being the “first doctor” from her village. None of it ever felt light.
So when the rural immersion program was announced in her final year — six months of mobile clinics, vaccination drives, and government health camps — Saral welcomed it. A break from sterile labs and lecture halls. She skimmed the village list with clinical detachment.
Until her thumb stopped.
Her own village.
A knot formed in her stomach.
It had been five years. She hadn’t returned — not even for Diwali. She blamed exams, internships, the “fear of falling behind.” But the truth was harder: Saral didn’t want to look back. She missed her parents with a physical ache, but made sure they visited her. She booked their train tickets, claimed the city was “more comfortable,” and gently steered them away from asking her to return.
She hadn’t distanced herself from them — only from everything else. From the kind of poverty that smelled like smoke, wet cow dung, and resignation. From the house with walls peeling like old skin and a ceiling that leaked more than rain.
The breeze from those windows was earthy, real — but they also held the imprint of her father’s fingers on rusted frames, gripping through silent nights of grief.
But the assignment wasn’t optional.
As the university jeep neared the outskirts, Saral’s palms began to sweat.
Her classmates — with branded stethoscopes and loud laughter — leaned out to marvel at mustard fields and goats crossing roads. One asked, “Hey Saral, isn’t this your village?”
She nodded once, stiffly.
They looked at her with surprise — not mockery or pity. Just curiosity. One girl, who once joked about Saral’s steel tiffin, said quietly, “It’s peaceful here. I’ve never seen stars like this.”
Saral didn’t respond. To her, those stars were the ones she counted on powerless, hungry nights. They weren’t beautiful. They were cold, distant — like everything she once wanted.
Stepping out onto the red earth felt like a dream turned inside out.
Children rushed up, shouting “Didi!” and clinging to her salwar. An old teacher limped out of the school, wiping tears on her sari. Her mother stood at the edge of the crowd, holding a plate of sweets with trembling hands. Her father was just behind, shawl draped neatly, eyes glassy. He looked at her as if every unpaid bill, every night he’d gone hungry, had been worth it.
Saral smiled. She let herself be hugged, thanked, congratulated — “a white coat with god in her hands,” someone said. But inside, something quietly cracked.
Her classmates — who once called her “too quiet” or “too serious” — now walked beside her on the same mud roads she used to sweep. They took selfies by the banyan tree, complimented her mother’s tea, helped carry crates to the clinic. No one flinched at the rusted pump or bare walls.
They seemed more at ease than she was.
That’s when it hit her: they weren’t judging her. She was.
She’d braced for mockery or pity — the only responses she'd ever prepared for. What she hadn’t expected was acceptance. Unbothered, unsentimental acceptance of where she came from. Of who she had been.
They saw a quaint village.
She saw a battlefield of shame, hunger, and memory.
And now, surrounded by her two worlds — the one she escaped and the one she earned — Saral felt stripped. Naked in a way no white coat could protect her from.
Her degrees, her clipped speech, her rising status — none of it softened the blow of returning as a stranger to the soil that had raised her.
~ The Rope and the Well
As the medical camp neared its end, so did the news of the hospital proposal—wrapped in garlands and sugar.
That evening, the sarpanch had called them “blessed parents.” His words still echoed as he walked beside Saral like a proud uncle, his slippers kicking up dust as they approached the empty plot of land. Wild grass swayed in the breeze. A cow grazed nearby, unaware it stood where an X-ray machine might one day buzz.
“Yahan banega aspataal,” he said with soft triumph. “Your daughter will run a hospital. Right here. Where she belongs.”
Her mother covered her mouth and cried. Her father folded his hands, whispering something to the heavens.
Saral remained still. Watching. Listening.
She looked out over the land. It smelled of earth and wet leaves — the same scent that once clung to her uniform as she walked to school in the monsoon, soaked ankles, empty stomach, eyes fixed on anything but her feet.
“You will be its heart, beta. You. Imagine — our village’s daughter, heading the clinic that will change lives.”
That night, her mother lit an extra diya and wept quietly. Her father simply stared at the ceiling. Frogs croaked outside, filling the silence.
Later, when her parents placed a hot dinner before her — rice, dal, a green vegetable she hadn’t tasted in years — she stared at it, willing herself to feel hunger, as if that might make what she was about to say easier.
“Mai, Baba…” Her voice cracked like an old radio.
They looked at her with eyes still glistening from joy.
“I won’t be staying,” she said. Her voice was even, but tired. “I already said yes to the job in the city. The hospital chain — it’s almost confirmed. It’s the kind of place people dream of. I can’t walk away now.”
Her mother blinked. “But beto… the sarpanch—he said—”
“I know what he said, Mai.”
Her father’s shoulders sagged. “It’s such an honour, Saral… our village, our people… You’ll be helping so many—”
“I didn’t become a doctor to come back,” she said sharply. “Not here. Not again.”
“But... beto, this is your home.”
Saral shook her head. “It was never my home, Mai. Not really. You made it one for me, but I always knew I had to leave it behind.”
Her father looked down at his hands.
“We thought... you’d be proud. That this would make you happy.”
“I am proud,” Saral said, the words catching in her throat. “I just... I can't come back. Not yet. Maybe never fully. It feels like betrayal even saying that aloud, but I have to be honest.”
Then her voice broke — like something fragile cracking after years of pressure.
“I remember everything, Baba. Every single thing.”
She turned to him.
“I remember the nights you went to bed without eating,” she said softly. “Pretending you'd already had dinner, while I ate the two rotis you saved. I saw you — crying into your pillow when you thought we were asleep. Whispering sorry to the ceiling.”
Her father looked down. His calloused fingers twisted the edge of his dhoti, helpless.
She turned to her mother.
“And Mai… I remember you re-stitching the same saree twenty times. The one with the faded flowers. You mopped floors with more dignity than most people wear jewelry. I remember how you touched every new fabric at the market, sighed, and walked away smiling — then gave me your saved-up money for a new dress or school bag.”
Her mother’s lips quivered. She looked at her hands — hands that had washed other people’s dishes for decades.
“You think I don’t carry those memories every day?” Saral asked. “I do. I carry them like breath.”
Her voice softened.
“Even now, when I eat a full meal, something inside me whispers—what if Baba’s hungry? What if Ma didn’t eat today? What if someone else needed that extra roti more than me?”
A thick, sacred silence settled.
“This village gave me love,” she continued. “But also shame. Strength — and fear. Purpose — and pain. Coming back brings it all back. And I’m tired of fighting ghosts in rooms that smell like old sorrow.”
She met their eyes.
“I’m not selfish, Baba. I’m just tired. Tired of living for everyone else. Tired of being the family’s or village’s redemption story. I want to know — just once — what it feels like to live for myself. To succeed without guilt. To be soft without shame. To not carry every missed meal like a ghost on my back.”
Her father blinked fast, trying to hide the wetness in his eyes.
“I don’t want to forget where I came from,” she added. “But I also don’t want to be imprisoned by it. I didn’t study because I loved biology. I studied because it was the only rope out of a well I was drowning in. And now… now that I’ve climbed out, I can’t jump back in just because someone built a ladder.”
Her mother reached for her hand. “We never asked you to carry all of it, beta.”
“I know,” Saral said. “You didn’t have to. I just did. And now… I want to learn what it means to do something — not for pride, not for gratitude, not even for duty. But because I want to. Just want to.”
She paused.
“For once, I want to be the selfish one in the story. And not feel like I owe the world an apology for surviving.”
Her father finally looked up. His voice cracked.
“You don’t owe us anything, Saral. We gave you everything so you could one day choose your own path. Even if it leads away from us.”
And that’s when she broke — quietly, but fully. Not out of guilt. But from the relief of being seen and heard. Not as a savior. Not as a symbol. Just as their daughter.
In the hush that followed, her mother spoke again — barely above a whisper, as if speaking to the dust itself.
“You think this is your end. Your escape. Your purpose. But maybe all of this — this village, this pain, the rotis your father skipped, the sarees I re-stitched — maybe it’s just the preface. You’re not done yet. Life hasn’t even turned the first real page.”
Her father looked up, eyes wide and wet, as if he’d just realized something he hadn’t let himself believe.
Saral turned to her mother, breath caught in her throat.
“You’ve climbed out of the well, betoo,” her mother said gently. “But don’t shut the lid behind you. Maybe one day, you’ll come back — not just to visit, not just for a camp — but to teach others how to climb. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But you will. Because no one runs forever, Saral. Not from themselves.”
Something shifted inside her — like a door quietly opening in her chest.
She didn’t reply that night. But when she lay down on the thin mattress beneath the same ceiling fan that once rocked her to sleep, she whispered into the dark:
“Maybe I’m not done. Maybe Ma’s right. Maybe this isn’t the finish line — it’s just a pause. A comma. But it’s not going to be today. Not tomorrow. Someday… when my soul allows me to, I’ll begin again.”
~The Place Between
The city no longer overwhelmed Saral. But it didn’t dazzle her either. It just fit — like clothes tailored after years of hand-me-downs.
She stood on her balcony, tea in hand. The skyline glittered in the distance — not an escape anymore, but a quiet reminder: she’d made it.
Inside, her mother folded sarees Saral had insisted on buying. Her father sat at the table, tearing into soft rotis she’d rolled, always serving him the extra one he used to skip.
No one said much. But the silence felt full now — like something was slowly mending in all of them.
She wasn’t trapped in the present or haunted by the past. She was growing into herself.
Her weeks blurred into rhythm — surgeries, admin meetings, hospital rounds, and Sunday brunches with colleagues who wore ambition like perfume. Her apartment: spotless. Her wardrobe: curated. Her schedule: tight.
And still — something tugged. Not guilt. Not longing. Just a quiet dissonance, like a song playing in two keys at once.
One evening, her father came back from a walk, carrying a modest white box tied with a string.
“Jalebis from Chandu’s,” he said, placing them gently on the dining table. “Still warm.”
Saral blinked. “That place still exists? I used to live for those jalebis!”
“They were sent for you,” he replied, settling into his chair.
“By whom?”
He smiled. “Remember my friend Shyamlal from the next village? His son, Anand, just got into a top engineering college in Mumbai.”
Saral sipped her water. “That’s wonderful. But I don’t understand. Why send me sweets?”
Her father looked at her for a long moment, then said softly, “Because you paid his fees.”
Saral froze. “What? No, Baba, I didn’t—”
“You did,” he said, tapping the table gently with his fingers. “The money you keep giving us to ‘spend on ourselves.’ We’ve been saving it. When Shyamlal came to me, worried sick, I knew what to do.”
Her throat tightened. “You should’ve told me.”
“Why?” he shrugged. “It was your money. We only passed it along. And Anand… he said to thank you. From the bottom of his heart. He’ll never forget.”
Saral sat back, stunned. It wasn’t about the money. It was about what her parents had done with it. Quiet. Thoughtful. Exactly as they had always lived — not for applause, but for purpose.
That night, she watched her parents ready for bed. Some things hadn’t changed.
Her mother still circled the tulsi with cow dung before dawn. Her father still slept on the floor in summer, calling mattresses “too soft for old bones.” And every morning, they sat on the balcony with steel tumblers of tea — no phones, no news, just presence.
Years ago, these habits embarrassed her. Now, they made her smile.
She’d changed, yes. But not by losing who she was. By beginning to understand it.
So when a colleague asked her to join a rural medical camp, she didn’t say yes. But she didn’t say no either.
Later that night, flipping through an old book her mother had unpacked, she paused.
“Maybe I’ll go,” she thought. “Not to fix anything. Not to prove anything. Just to see if I still feel the same, or if the past still walks beside me. ”
The trip was short — three days, four villages, a dusty bus smelling of Dettol and guava peel.
But something shifted.
In one village, she saw a girl with a red-and-blue schoolbag — the kind Saral once dreamed of. The girl walked barefoot across a dry streambed, reading a dog-eared science guide.
Saral froze. No anger, no sorrow. Just… recognition.
I used to run to escape. Now I want to understand why I ran.
By the time she returned, her decision was made. Not a sacrifice. A realignment.
She started small: alternate weekends at a government clinic near the village. No press. No fanfare. Just checkups, mentorship, and a book corner in the old storeroom. Refurbished computers. Quiet intention.
When interns asked why, she smiled.
“Because someone once didn’t give up on me.”
One evening, folding laundry, she said without looking up, “I think I’ve figured it out.”
Her father, notebook in hand, looked over. “Figured what?”
“This balance — the weekends there, the weeks here. I like it.”
He smiled, a little wistfully. “I used to think I had to pick one life too.”
“You mean, before you became a mason?”
He nodded. “I was a singer. Toured with a theatre troupe before marriage. But I wasn’t educated. Couldn’t read sheet music or sign contracts. So I picked up a trowel instead of a tune.”
Her mother added, “He still sings — in whispers.”
Saral smiled. “You still write songs.”
He grinned. “Only in the margins of old masonry diaries.”
She reached for it. “Let me see?”
He pulled it away playfully. “You’ll mock it. Say something like ‘monsoon clouds and forgotten lentils.’”
She laughed. “That was one time!”
He grew serious. “One thing feeds the stomach. The other feeds the soul. Who says they have to take turns?”
Her mother nodded. “You didn’t become a doctor by abandoning who you were, Saral. You just… grew around her.”
Her father added, “And you don’t need to lose your world to share it. You’re not choosing between dreams. You’re braiding them.”
Saral leaned into his shoulder. “So I don’t have to lose something to gain something.”
He nodded. “Exactly. Life isn’t a balance sheet. It’s a thali — a little sweet, a little spice, some bitter, some sour. You don’t remove a dish to enjoy another. You just learn to eat slowly.”
Her mother added, “And wash your fingers before reaching for the jalebi.”
Then she paused — just long enough to let the meaning land — and added, "with your expensive, strawberry-smelling handwash. Just because you return to your roots doesn’t mean you have to leave behind what you’ve earned.”
They all laughed.
Her city life stayed intact. Lavender tea, heels at board reviews, brunches and plays, and a love that was slowly, honestly growing.
But she no longer lived like she was choosing sides.
She simply… bridged them.
And every time she packed her bag for the village — kurta, worn stethoscope, the same case that once held all her dreams — she felt something new:
Balance.
Not the kind in brochures.
The real kind.
The kind that comes when guilt no longer drives you, and grace begins to guide you.
The kind her father had described — a thali full of flavors once kept apart, now allowed to sit side by side.
And for the first time, Saral didn’t feel torn between two lives.
She felt full.
Maybe that’s how life works — not in halves or compartments, but in circles.
The past doesn’t vanish when you move forward.
It folds into you — shaping how you walk, how you love, what you carry, and what you finally let go.
One weekend, as Saral stacked grain sacks in the storeroom, her mother watched.
“You know,” she said, “I used to worry.”
Saral looked up. “About what?”
“That the world would pull you down. That it would tell a girl like you who she’s allowed to be. But you held your head high. Even when you cried, you never let go of your fire.”
She touched her daughter’s cheek.
“I’m proud of the woman you’ve become. Not because you left all this behind. But because you brought it with you. And made space for it.”
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