The Rebel’s Wife (2)

For all those who’ve been wanting more, specially the female who asked me at least thrice in the past week ~ here’s the rest of “The Rebel’s Wife“:

“Your father didn’t die in a road accident. Your father was killed on the road. The road was our home. We lost our house. We lost our land. We even lost our identity. The Government took away all that was ours. Or all that we thought we’d owned. And it didn’t even care. All it cared about was money. And we didn’t have any – for us or for them.”

She wiped her tears away. Years had passed and she’d seen worse days but she still went weak in her knees when she thought about those times. She looked into the eyes of her fifteen year old sons and continued.

“Your father, along with others, protested. They were agitating powerlessly against people so ruthless, so cruel and so unforgiving that I wondered if they were created by the same God. We were the wronged; but they looked down upon us. For days on end, we would be without proper food or water. A blanket was a luxury. Smiles seemed to have evaporated overnight. There would be children crying everywhere. Day or night, you could hear the shrieks of babies and the groans of the ill and old. The men were mostly away. Some came back to take their families elsewhere. By the end of the ordeal we were mostly women and children. No one cared if we lived or died. This went on for over a year. We were all scared. Some of us were paranoid. We thought our troubles would never end. But they did.”

“One form of trouble ended. The roads were no longer our homes. They were the burial ground for our men. And the homes they brought us to were the burial grounds for us women. They called my husband a rebel. A rebel he was. He rebelled for a home, for water, for food, for security, for identity, for a life. He rebelled for his family. And he rebelled for all the people he treated as family. He didn’t desert them and run. But he deserted us and died.”

She loved him. But she also hated him. And she let her kids know that today.

She got up to pack the twins’ bags. She was sending them off to the Army. Her country might treat her like the rebel’s wife, but she knew what her late husband wanted. Unlike him she didn’t see his vision of fighting for the masses against the classes but she never questioned him. She accepted that her fate was tied to her husband’s decisions.

Graciously Yours!