Deepa has been working hard. For years. She had only one dream in her life. A dream of attaining a standard of life. Earning a life of comfort for her parents. Transcending their lives of toil and pain to a life of tranquility and breather. In this crowded world, she only has her parents. Despite their illiteracy, they admitted Deepa to an Convent school so that she not only becomes literate, but she learns good English. They have arranged for best tutors and coaching centers so that Deepa can become a software engineer. Deepa started earning a living at a very young age of twelve. She used to provide tuition to her neighborhood kids. In Laxma Puram, the village where Deepa was born to her lower caste parents and has been brought up, all the people belonged to one or the other lower castes and were illiterate till the generation of Deepa’s parents. These parents used to earn a living from hard physical labor of wage earner. The entire village aspired to do well financially and as first step of accomplishment of the thought, the parents started sending their children to schools that teach English. Yet the children needed help at home to understand their lessons from school better. This need had created earning opportunity for Deepa.
Tutoring helped Deepa build her communication skills better. While justifying her need for education loan or her suitability to a job, she made her points at ease, without butterflies meddling with her stomach. She heard of too many people at these stages having butterflies at their stomachs, though none for her. She secured a moderate rank at the entrance examination of her engineering course. Her caste quota appeared to be of great help in choice of the colleges. She managed a seat in a government sponsored college and was awarded a scholarship that made her residential costs at the campus free. For meeting rest of the course expenses, she had to borrow from a bank. Here, too, her caste and gender played a helpful role. She went ahead of several applicants as her caste and gender, had started by then being favored after enduring eons of disrespect. In college, she has found herself cornered just because she had made it ahead of many because of her caste and gender. It invited her unwanted enmity from girls and boys. She withstood it. She had the faith that once in her life she would be able to alter all these judgements of the fellow people and she would be judged only by her merit.
In search of excellence, purely through merit, she had been enlightened with option of pursuing post graduate studies in the United States. She heard in college that the United States is the country that is rewarding to merits irrespective of caste, creed, gender and race. She decided then to emigrate to the United States if she obtains an opportunity to enter the country as a student. In her endeavor to pursue a post graduate study in the United States, she found that she must have great amount of savings to survive at least the first couple of weeks. Besides, she must have some means to support her parents so that they no longer need to earn a living from hard physical labor at stone quarries, at agricultural fields, at construction sites.
She made a plan, spread over a decade. She took the first job offered to her on campus. She started doing the job and paying back her student loan. Within one year, she has been assigned with an onsite role in Europe. Like in India, she toiled there, too, over weekends, at stretches of thirty-six hours, supporting customer interactions of a bank, while her colleagues took off to visit places in the foreign countries. She saved every possible penny. After returning to India, she not only repaid her entire student loan, but also, she was able to make fresh loans for building a reinforced house for her parents. She has been happy that her parents would be able to join the league of the owners of concrete houses in Laxma Puram and become inspiration for several parents living in thatched roof mud walled cottages and rearing their children with strong determination.
Following year, she landed in South Africa supporting the information technology projects of a bank there, again. She felt a departure from her ambition to moving to the United States. She dreaded the feeling of loss. She tightened her jaws and remembered her parents’ faces sculptured with wrinkles of stress even at a very young age. She started working even harder. She started planning even smarter. Returning from South Africa, she repaid all the loans she made for reinforcing the house. The house, by then, became spacious enough to become warehouse of fast moving consumer goods. She made another entrepreneurial loan for starting a distributorship of fast moving consumer goods. She purchased lands by highway to start one food corner, one cyber café and one grocery shop under same roof. The highway was about to be extended as part of Golden Quadrilateral Project. This is what she heard from the media. Like the highway, her project by the highway was tentative then. She wanted to be ready before the highway starts buzzing with traffic.
She continued to stay in shared apartments as paying guests in the city of her work. She started siphoning all her money towards the businesses she perceived. The businesses made her travel to home every weekend. Her mother was quite overwhelmed by then with the responsibilities of distributorship. Learning to read and write along with learning to operate computers within a very short period was a huge achievement and accumulation of stress at her age. Deepa’s father was occupied to his armpits in the project of developing three businesses on the spots by highway. She started repaying all entrepreneurial loans by this time from earnings of the distributorship. She was supporting her livelihood and her parents’ livelihood from her salary of the job.
Ravi appeared at this point in her life. He was very impressed by the spirit and professionalism of Deepa. He joined Deepa’s team and kept in touch with her even after they were released from the team. Yet Ravi could not express his love much. He was very dependent of his parents for his studies and job. His parents used to be established farmers and sold lands to support Ravi through his engineering degree from a private college. Ravi had a sister in the United States where his brother-in-law used to be an immigrant and his sister, too. Ravi, too, had dreams of going there. His sister could have supported his dream, but his parents would not allow him to avail such support. It is against their prejudices that their son-in-law being benefactor of their son. Ravi had lean chances of travelling abroad as he had a very poor communication. Deepa took this lack of communication skill deterring him from overtly expressing his love for Deepa. When they were working as offshore team for a bank in the United States, there had been talks several times for Deepa’s onsite travel. Deepa did not avail those options for many reasons. The prime reason appeared to be her business ventures being at nascent stages. The real reason had been travelling onsite in the United States was not accomplishment of her dream. She was determined to travel there only as a student of merit.
Suddenly the competition for distributorship increased with others copying her idea in the village. Deepa’s mother had been struck with hypertension. Her father had to take time off from the business projects at highway site. It became difficult to pay back rest of the loan amounts just from Deepa’s earning from her salary.
Ravi asked Deepa to meet his parents around this time. Deepa had not been very sure about the future of this relationship. She had always found her cornered by others because of her caste and what she had achieved. If Ravi had been thinking of marrying Deepa, then the caste would be the biggest possible barrier. However, she met Ravi’s parents. She got the vibes full of disrespect. Ravi’s mother asked Deepa, “How will your parents will pay dowry for your marriage if you are the only earner? We’re thinking of sending our son to where my daughter is. His in-laws must arrange that for him, as we did for our daughter.” Ravi mentioned, “She can travel to where my sister is any day if she avails onsite opportunities laid before her. Then she can take her husband as her dependent.”
In a short while, a scheme became unfolded before Deepa. Gradually she made herself detached from Ravi. Surprisingly, it was not painful. She felt relieved that she had not been in an intimate relationship that could have been based on deceit. There was no love, no respect, but a prospect for Ravi to depend on Deepa’s caliber. Deepa could have joyfully borne the burden if Ravi and his parents would not reflect their perspectives of dowry and related interests on Deepa. In order to avoid Ravi more, Deepa changed her apartment, first, then her company. This change appeared to be financially very beneficial for Deepa. The new job appeared to be fur more lucrative compared to the previous one. Even then it remained harder to repay the loans and prepare herself for travelling to the United States for pursuing a post graduate degree course.
Deepa grabbed the first opportunity laid before her to travel to the United States, at this point. The decision was out of dire need. The highway was taking longer than she could have borne the financial stress of her businesses by the highway near Laxma Puram. She left home again, this time leaving behind an ailing mother and a fatigued father. However, stepping in the United States appeared to be rejuvenating for her. She was toiling hard as usual. But even then, she was having lots of free time for enquiring about post graduate courses in the universities. With rendezvous with the professors and admission departments she started preparing herself for her GRE and ToEFL. The money she was earning there, helped her get out of the financial burden for the businesses by the highway. It helped her mother see a cure and control for her hypertension. It also helped Deepa’s father to find breather from the financial challenge which he can barely do anything about. He started looking into the business with new enthusiasm and confidently advised Deepa to think of abandoning the idea of running cyber café as mobile data became affordable among the highway travelers and households became connected by broadband. He further advised her to expand the food business and diversify chiefly in to food and beverages shrinking the groceries option.
With so many things happening around in this few years of almost a decade, Deepa found herself much older than her actual age. Most often looking at the mirror she discovered her mother’s image, older with wrinkles of stress and experience. Most often, she heard that student life had been free of all stresses. This adage was not true for her. She spent all her student life in extreme poverty and financial stress. After, repaying all the loans of her life, with the businesses running steadily, she wished desperately to go back to school. Yet she need some savings for her parents to survive during her school days independent of the earnings from the businesses, so that her parents could spend a life of retirement if they wished. With all these thoughts and plans running through her head, she wrote her GRE and ToEFL in a gap of a month and scored so high that all professors she approached from MIT through Duke to Idaho State University, asked her to finish the admission process and join the courses following fall. Thus, she obtained another year to her preparation and financial preparation for her parents.
As soon as the application season commenced she applied ten universities and institutes of her choice. She contacted back her favorite professors at the college from where she graduated with her engineering degree, but to her dismay they all were retired from work but one. Yet she requested them to respond to the recommendations asked by the universities she was applying with. She waited with beating heart for the selection outcome season. She has been excited again, as much as excited she used to be at eighteen after writing too many examinations for being admitted into an engineering course. Yet this time excitement is too much for the outcome was related to her freedom from judgements that had always undermined her merit, sincerity, hard work and achievements. The excitement was much deeper for the outcome can bring her an immigration to the United States, the society that has been built by the immigrants, starting from the Native Indians whose ancestors crossed Bering strait to build civilizations all across the Americas.
It was around February. She received the first email from the admission office of MIT. It declared that all her efforts has gone in vain. She could not make it to MIT. She thought for once to stop relying on her merit. Later, after a day’s work at office, she found solace in her aspirations that before the responses from the professors she never thought that she would ever be able to make it to an institution as prestigious as MIT. There were still nine more results to be out. Deepa held her breath and faced on message of rejection from all other universities and institutes. Fortunately, Idaho State University informed her that they could keep Deepa’s application live for following fall and would wait for her to submit her transcripts in proper format with details of subjects she read per semester. This information ensued a knee jerk reaction in Deepa. She opened the remaining copy of transcript issued by an ancient Indian University that issued her engineering degree a decade ago. To her dismay, she discovered that the university issued a summary of her scores, only. It brought a realization to Deepa that it was not her merit, but the failed procedures of the university she studied in India deterred her admission to the universities in the United States.
She prepared to go back to India. For collecting her transcripts in the prescribed format before following fall. Returning home, she found the highway in fully functional form. The active highway boosted her food junction to a great way and it started making profits after years of struggle. Her distributorship of fast moving consumer goods was in deliberate need of expansion with another larger warehouse. Yet she ran to the university. She was just intoxicated in her passion to go back to school. The university denied her transcripts in any other format citing their age-old policies. She knew that her classmates who went to post graduate schools even five years ago, got their respective transcripts approved by the departmental heads in college. In her time of admission, the institutions and universities in the United Sates were asking approval on transcripts from the registrar of the University and were not recognizing approval of any other authorities. Deepa, driven by her go-getter attitude, wrote an application to the registrar attached with transcript in pertinent format and all supporting documents. She sent all those documents by speed post to the university. Yet she sought a personal appointment with the university registrar.
The registrar appeared to be very professional. She heard Deepa’s predicament with patience and approved Deepa’s transcripts with proper procedures on the very day of the appointment. Deepa sent those transcripts to the University of Idaho. The specs of grief for being rejected by MIT gradually disappeared from corners of her heart.
************
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This story belongs to an anthology of my short stories are now out. It comprises ten different short stories of ten different tastes, shades and environments. Some set in paranormal India, some in serene forests and mountains. Some are spread from remote villages of Telangana to the United States. Some speaks of a controlled restrictive society and its freedom seeking denizens thriving through odds of politics, corruption and natural disasters. Some are depiction of strife of relationships. Some clings to brighter hopes and joy. Some include contemporary discourse on gender and beyond (what we do not know and are ignoring as a knowledge under peer pressure and scenarios that are waiting for appropriate moments to explode into experience). In nutshell, it narrates stories of contemporary Indians and their diversity.
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