To the Anya in You

By Nilantika Banerjee

ts the story of Anya, a very prodigious young girl who is the unwanted child of her mother. Anya is young, free spirited and talented but the one thing she hides well from the rest of the world is that she always holds herself in contempt for not being able to be a daughter lovable enough to have evoked motherly feelings in Mrs Sushma Bakshi - her mother . The story traces Anyas journey from infancy through adolescence & finally adulthood & how she handles the trials & tribulations in her life. Many a times in her journey Anya felt like the proverbial black swan, two factions fighting inside her head trying to get control of her mind. Her lover Anish too gets entangled in Anyas struggle with the darker shades of herself. So that finally it all boils down to only one question Does Anya emerge a winner in the litmus test against her own more humanly emotions of vindictiveness & vengeance or does she has enough piousness to hold her at the edge..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Mar 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482820942

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Copyright © 2014 by Nilantika Banerjee.

ISBN:                  Softcover                        978-1-4828-2095-9

                            Ebook                             978-1-4828-2094-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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CONTENTS

Anya’s Life

Ranjan & Sushma

The Curse of Birth

It’s Springtime

The Game of Life

Starting Afresh

The Black Swan

Is It Me???

The Last Letter

Anya’s Life

A nya means the ‘The One The Big Eyes’ in Arabic. It also means ‘gracious’ or ‘merciful’ in Russian. Anya was named by her father’s PhD guide Dr. Ganguly—who also took keen interest in linguistics as a hobby & was like a father figure in Ranjan’s life. Anya really loved her name! Anya’s father Mr. Ranjan Bakshi was a teacher in the M.D Memorial School in their neighbourhood, in Tollygunge in South Kolkata, where they lived.

Although Anya was very introvert as a child but people who knew her up & close, knew she had a completely different side too!! They knew how quirky she could get if in the mood! But personally Anya craved for two things more than anything else—‘peace of mind’ & ‘tranquillity’ but ironically her mother Sushma always ensured that she never got either!

Sometimes Anya really thought her mother is a step one or that she might have been conceived with the help of a sperm donor & somehow her mother had accidentally discovered the identity of the donor after her birth & developed an immediate disgust for the donor & consequentially for her!

But unfortunately none of the imageries of her fertile & over imaginative mind were true. Violating the very spirit of motherhood, her mother Sushma, for every single, living moment planned how she could wreck havoc in the life of Anya & her father.

The point to note here was, Anya’s mother Sushma Bakshi was an ambitious woman who aimed for the sky but this she aimed for not by the virtue of her talent of by working hard rather she dreamt of being the rich, glamorous, philanthropic housewife of a top notch executive or high flying businessman & bask in that reflected glory. But her husband had miserably failed to live up to her expectations.

Mr. Bakshi fell in that rare category of people who are content with life, who like to swim with the current rather than against it. He valued his personal relations more than money, gardening more than gold & his evening adda* more than making meticulous plans about creating wealth. How these two polar opposites took the fatal decision of spending their life together appeared to Anya more complicated that THE STRING THEORY!!

May be Sushma had seen the initial flash of brilliance in Ranjan & inferred his economic success as natural conclusion—Anya thought. But Mr. Bakshi was more than happy in limiting his brilliance under the roof of his own home, in teaching Anya complex algorithms, in making prototypes of complex engineering applications & affectionately displaying them in his show case, teaching neighbourhood kids & often for free!

As Anya grew & her mind matured she nurtured a secret pride in a small corner of her heart for her father who could have invoked envy in others by being rich but instead chose to do the same by being completely indifferent to wealth!!

Every person coming in touch with Ranjan Bakshi somehow felt he was far too qualified for being a junior school teacher, as if he had chosen this profession as a hobby not something commensurate with his capabilities or education. Only Ranjan Bakshi knew where the compulsion lied!!

Anya being very sensitive even as a child could always understand that there was something wrong in her family, but the intricacies of the problem was a little difficult for her to decipher at her age. Luckily she had a guardian angel in the form of a distant paternal aunt, who came to stay with them after she had been widowed. Anya lovingly called her ‘Mini’.

Whenever the fights between her parents would reach an ugly crescendo, Anya would silently thank her stars for sending her Mini. Whenever there would be dirty foul-mouthing between her parents, Anya would quietly slip into Mini’s room & together they would play Scrabble or mini would tell her stories & together they would be oblivious of the harsh reality of their respective circumstances.

In spite of her delicate situation, Anya had this amazing quality of masking her feelings & so much so that nobody ever got an inkling on what weighed on her heart & mind. The best time of