Excerpt: Dikshita's True Confessions

“Will you be satisfied with the fruit of your life’s work? Will the efforts you are making now bring you satisfaction when things of time are receding and eternity looms ahead?”

Dikshita the wife of a retired cop continues to pour her heart out on a blog in the evening of her life. She asks many questions to herself as Puru her husband of many years had become partially deaf or pretended to be so to avoid answering her. With her daughters married, divorced, remarried and gone she really has no one to talk to. With retirement the fleet of serfs she was so used to bullying had also vanished. Even Barbie-III her mongrel had died of some respiratory infection. She didn’t have the energy or inclination to take in another pup.

August 31st

Why do I feel so low today? Yet another month comes to an end, but that’s not all. Puru had to submit his fact finding enquiry commission against the ‘Beauty Queen’ the former Chief Minister. He had managed to get an extension for a year and being a punctilious soul wrapped up the work within the allotted time. Most enquiry commissions I have heard of drag on and on till people forget why such an enquiry commission was set up.
My primary grouse is that the perks that came with post will be gone. No free telephone, no white ambassador car with the mandatory red light complete with a driver and a couple of peons who did my vegetable and grocery shopping and other odd jobs.

So you can understand my feeling low. Particularly when I see the loutish constables who act as guards of a judge who has retired six-months ago. Katria Ram the judge is an affable man but ultimately everyman hangs on to the symbols of power. When the huge big blue police bus arrived to take away the guards the good judge rushed out; claiming that the High Court had given him the permission to keep them for some ‘time’ as he was expecting to head some enquiry commission soon. The cops were taken aback not only by this strange stand but also by the unwillingness of those constables posted there.
They refused to go. Why? Because their loyalty was more to the retired judge than their own bosses as the old man was a Jat – a man of their own caste and community!
We gradually observe the caste factor making inroads in government functioning making a mockery of our so-called ‘secular’ society.