JILTED

 It was a big rickety house almost entirely built of wood. It had two main storeys and one large balcony end to end to that house.The balcony was covered by large windows with wooden panels, beautifully carved  and which had stood the vagaries of nature and matured so well.The house was  inhabited by  seniors comprising their respective families. As usual they too suffered their mutual jealousies and family competitions .A  hierarchy of high and low was built .It started with one of the elders  holding a higher social status  which gave the spontaneous right to his children to behave superior to their  cousins. This fomented the family feuds sometimes flaring up to the extent that even the elders got involved not that they wanted to mitigate the situations but only looking the other way, stocked the fire in their ladies  to the extent  that  the women of the house  started  with their  tirades and expletives till it was a gala time for the children  to make merry and be spared for all the mischief they created.

 Yet in  such a household there was a member who was guileless and may be for this reason  only he was not entertained  by his cousins.He was a tall lean young man into his twenties ,of fair complexion and  beautiful curly hair. His milky complexion and ever smiling lips made him distinct among his brothers and cousins . The cousins generally sat  together  discussing the topics of their studies but he  had the least aptitude for such  matters .He  had other aspirations though. He was enamoured by the articulation of the europeans who he saw in the tourist places which he  often  frequented  since his childhood , his state being the tourist hub. He wanted to master their  accent , the right turn of  the vowels ,the roll of rs and the lightness of sounds of the  consonants. Very quickly he  mastered the art  and sounded fluent to us the juniors in the household . He  would impress us by his speech and we would clap out of joy and call him 'angez' 'angrez' and cheer him up! He seemed to be one of us. The unseasoned inviolable chip  off  the block! 

Then one day we the children  found him terribly desperate. It seemed he had not slept during the night, his hair was dishevelled. We wanted to know what troubled him. He showed us towards a ventilator in that room where we usually sat together . It was a big enough room which served as dining and living room too. It had a big window to one side and on the other side a ventilator which opened into the courtyard of the neighbouring house.It was a house teeming with siblings and cousins.There were girls too ,some teenagers the friends of my aunts. They were not allowed to go outside and play as  they did  when young. It was a taboo to talk to grown up  boys and if seen doing so were permanently being  chaperoned by their elder brothers who turned their sole  masters and held them like their bonded slaves.In such a scenario who  could  have believed  that this uncle harboured a love affair with one of the girls next door. Though the love angle went over our  heads  but we still  wanted to help him.He said that  he had been jilted. He said he would take revenge.He got hold of a long narrow stick and thrust it through the narrow bars of the ventilator and started shouting for the  name of  the girl  but we saw he was trembling and had started babbling! And suddenly he threw the stick and left the room.  

It was later that I came to know that it was he who had jilted  the girl and  had  become the source of her disrepute!