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THE PICTURE FRAME

Meeta  is  in her seventies.  She is  full of  zest  for life and seeks every opportunity to be in the company of her friends. Her salt and pepper short hair goes well with her plump fat body. Her style of dressing accentuates  her care- free demeanour . Her age doesn't hamper her in anyway. She  often cracks  jokes which generally veer to obscenity, to make her friends laugh , which for a moment unsettles them ,but then they go with the flow. The instinct to deride  looks  meaningless  at such  an age.  Meeta   had lost her husband lately  and her only son  lived  in the U.S . She cultivated a large number of friends and revived the distant family  relations. She was awash with money and threw lavish parties. Generally all her friends are  retired  house wives  facing the same empty nest syndrome. They had  now ample time  to indulge their fancies  which they missed out  in their younger days. Meeta  too  diverted herself in this mirage of glamour and merriment.  It filled her empty house with the remnants of human  presence.

 In the stillness of her  dark nights Meeta stayed awake, staring at the bare wall in front of her. On the side of her bed stood the small table which was full with some medicines and a few books which she hardly opened. on one side of this table was the picture frame of her late husband. Slowly and with the passage of time  it became a part of the objects lying there and was as inanimate  as the rest of them.  And now in the eerie darkness of the house when the day time friends  turned into  mere dancing shadows, her stark loneliness haunted  her. 

Meeta wants to connect to her son  but freezes in the moment,  he too might be  fighting his own demons she ponders or  may be  she hardly matters to him now ,like that picture frame on her side table.

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