Embers That Start a Fire

Daya stared at the television and felt tears stab her eyes. The collective sigh of disappointment in the room revealed how much everybody was affected by the space mission's failure. She could hear her mother-in-law chanting, no doubt, hoping for some miracle to save it. Her husband Nitin loudly slapped the sofa as the headlines repeated the disappointing end - or hopefully, interlude - to this much awaited event. Her father-in-law shook his head and got up, clearly having expected some such fate.

But Daya herself felt as if it were a personal loss, a loss that had its roots fifteen years ago, when she gave up her pursuit of education to pursue Nitin and eloped to get married to him. Shalini, a friend she had reconnected with recently, told her, "I had expected you would be somewhere in NASA, working on some space mission! Never expected you to give it all up for marriage!"



That had been like a knife twisted in her heart. Though marrying Nitin had not been a bad decision, giving it all up for him had not been worth it, she realised belatedly. She needn't have gone all the way to the US, just crossing cities to blaze a trail in ISRO would have been enough. Space research had always been her dream, Rakesh Sharma and Kalpana Chawla her inspirations. She had pursued core physics and computers in the hope of becoming qualified enough to enter the portals of this venerated organisation, but had been waylaid in the computer classes by the handsome Nitin. Romance blinded her to everything else, even her own dreams. She wrote the entrance test for ISRO, but when her conservative parents opposed her relationship with Nitin, she didn't even care about the results, wanting nothing but to live with Nitin. Nitin's parents accepted her, but on the condition that she couldn't go to work. At that time, that had been a welcome alternative to forgetting Nitin. Three years after marriage, they had reluctantly agreed to her becoming a school teacher.

A school teacher.

A research scientist.

Many, many a slip between the cup and the lip.

Her research was restricted to the physics lab work. Her dreams reduced to thermocol models that she created to teach the children the concepts. To fight her own boredom in repeating class after class, year after year, she tried to teach innovatively, using models, drawings, and most importantly, imagination.

She had resigned herself to her fate. But today, it saddened her when she realised that she had killed her dreams for a man who did not even know she had set such lofty goals for herself. And she had only herself to blame for it.

She spent a restless weekend, the repeat reminders of the mission accosting her over news channels, Whatsapp messages, Facebook and even casual conversations with neighbours. She fought hard the tendency of her thoughts to drift towards what could have been. This was reality, better face it, she told herself as on Monday, she packed her bag and left for another dreary day.

A new message alert from Whatsapp made her look at the phone, and she hoped it was not yet another message about the mission. Seeing it was from a new number, she was about to ignore it when the first line of the message on the screen made her pause. "Ma'am, I was your student" it read and she opened the message.

"Ma'am, I was your student for three years and passed out eight years ago. I was part of the recent space mission, behind the scenes, and wanted to thank you for the love you instilled in me for space research. When we were working on the spacecraft I thought of messaging you, but waited to see it succeed. Though it didn't go as expected, we are already back to the drawing board. I seek your blessings that Mission 2.0 succeeds. For some reason, I felt that I must reach out to you."

Daya stood rooted, but she felt she was over the moon.