My short life line.

Whenever people with a little bit of knowledge in palmistry, look down at my dainty hands with eyes all screwed up in concentration, all they manage to comprehend looking at the small and big criss-crosses on my palm, is that i have a very short life line and that my life would be fraught with mishaps and problems, not like i couldn't make that out on my own. But as a kid, such sooth saying on behalf on my friends always scared me, and I could always find my lil heart pounding at such prognosis, especially when it came with a smirk and sometimes with sympathy, as if i was to pop of the surface the very next moment. It always scared me to think of the proposition that I'd die early, without having lived the usual life. A life where I'd be earning, going with shopping sprees with ma, buying her sarees, making Papa proud, seeing my cousin lil sister get married etc.

To think that one fine day while crossing the road I'd have a car or a bus or a truck *scared* bash against my body, leaving my body in smitherins, barely recognizable, mama papa inconsolable or probably a scab growing into a huge gangrene of sorts, infecting my blood, killing me slowly, with me looking into my imminent death, crying silent tears into my pillow everynight, braving a smile everytime my friends visited, with syringes piercing into my body. As a kid with all the thinking that I did, I'd turned into a sadistic personality who derived pleasure from her own wretchedness, covering down at the rebukes by teachers, who i dont know why deried pleasure at calling me a numbskull, probably if not directly but subtly hinting it.

As to the crisscrosses on my pudgy palm, i dont know whether they hint at my luckless life (luck i know is relative). A life where I wished i'd spent more of my formative years with Ma, doing the mental maths problems she gave me, listening to AIR or watching 'chutti-chutti' on doordarshan, on our black white philips television set, instead of the humungous number of maid servants i spent my childhood with. my colloquial oriya accent is to their credit, where in I was made a guinea pig to their foray into cooking.. How I longed to cuddle up in ma's lap when I got back, instead of watching scooby doo while i had lunch. to come all bright eyed home to tell her i had scored the highest in maths.

Those days are long gone, now that I've already lived twenty years of my life, and with maturity finally having seeped in, that this was how it was always meant to be and that a short and sweet life is all that mattered, where you did your part inspite of the unfairness doled out to you, while keeping your inherent goodness intact.

ps: Just refreshing my old stories ,warming up my writing skills.. :-)