How strange is it to note that it has already been more than a year since I poured my demons on this piece of writing! Incredible still to realize that it had been locked inside me, always in forms of one nightmare or another, for ten years before that fateful day last July. I say fateful not providential; I do not believe in providence. But I remember on that day I woke up with an instinctual, almost animalistic, urgency and furiously wrote "Mother & Memory." In one sitting... When I had finished three hours later I was trembling for in those three short hours I was forced to relive the tragedy of my life, and so many lives around me, in one concentrated dose. The three hours was one grim dash through the extended misery of a lifetime. I was trembling too because I had finally cut a corner and on seeing it on paper and posted on Sajha for everyone to see I knew the ordeal was finally behind me. In the last year since then I have grown more than the first twenty-three years of my life. It is inaccurate to say that the memory is entirely behind me; life may be lived in chapters but our consciousness is an amalgam of all that we have been through. But I am less bitter now; my past, though equally troublesome at times, is less demanding. The wound of arbitrary violence, uncertainty and doubt on my psyche is finally healing. It is a curious paradox of psychological wound that unlike physical ones, exposure heals it swifter. The comments on Sajha from the compassionate readers were my bandages then. Many asked if it was actually fiction. But as they say, fact is stranger than fiction. The poking and punching of the memory became therapeutic. May be that was the unconscious motive of my writing and posting it on Sajha. I did not want easy sympathy but an acknowledgment of a tragedy that was beyond my control. And for a society where little is shared such personal communication generated affirmations, recognitions and some very painful identifications of similar violence. I remember that when I shared Mother & Memory a friend wrote back quoting someone, "It is not what is done to us, but what we do that defines us." Although I will always carry a reminder of what was done to me, I refuse to be defined by that. My life's worth will be judged only by what I do. --- mG.