I’m sure you would agree that this story has a happy ending.

She was hardly any older than 6 years when her parents, living in a small town of rural India physically abused her, kept her devoid of education and made her do household chores. Now, when I say they belonged to ‘India’, I can hear judgments and pictures of slums thrown at me. No, India’s literacy rate is at 74.04% and also boasts of a few largest companies in the world.

Now, let’s go back in 2012 when I came across a little girl. I still don’t know her name, but let’s call her Meera.  Meera was born in Haryana, she lived there with her parents. Today, she doesn’t live there anymore; neither does she live with her parents.

Being dissatisfied with a girl child, the father bet Meera every day, while the mother never revolted. Meera suffered at her hands of her birth-givers. She stayed chained at home doing household chores.

The disappointment of the ‘man of the house’ didn’t last long because his wife was expecting a baby. Bringing new life into this world is a blessing to everyone, but someone else’s life away is a curse.

What Meera was going through wasn’t anything but a curse to be born to such parents who didn’t love her and left only bruises as memories. She wished that her sibling would comfort her, but hardly did she know what would happen next.

Nine months of wait for the parents to find out the gender, and nine months of cruelty faced by Meera by the alcoholic who called himself a man, and a woman who called herself a mother.

“It’s a boy!” he screamed and jumped and distributed sweets to family and friends. While Meera is still locked at her home, not allowed to participate in the happiness.

Hardly a few months from the arrival of a baby boy, then Meera’s parents decide to do away with her. They buy three tickets to the metropolitan city of Hyderabad, India. One for Meera, and two for the parents. But, they buy only two tickets back to Haryana, India.

Meera is abandoned on the railway station, parents immediately board the next train back home.

On finding her lost, crying, and worried, the railway authorities call the cops. She is taken to the police station and was enquired about her family. On asking the name of the father she is terrified, she trembles with fear and doesn’t utter a word. It seemed like she wanted to stay lost, and didn’t want to go home.

The cops had no choice but to let her stay at the city orphanage. The sisters tried their best to find out about her parents. But she never said a word. They only knew she hailed from Haryana.

She wore a simple ghaghra and had yellow highlights in her hair when I first saw her. It was the first time I saw a 6-year-old with highlights.The Sister at the orphanage told that she applied those highlights herself when she was in Haryana, and loved to dress up.

While she was dancing on stage she adjusts her duppatta. A little girl, fair, with rosy cheeks, curly brown hair with golden highlights, who doesn’t waste a grain of rice on her plate.

She loves to study along with her friends at the orphanage, dress up, and help others. The Sisters said she is the naughtiest of the rest.

Initially, after a month of her stay at the orphanage, the Sisters asked her if she wanted to go home.

She said, “This is my home.”

She finally had the love she always wanted. And, wherever she is today, she’d be happy.

Based on a true story. 

Author Bio

Harsha Sheelam always had the passion for writing. In the year 2016, she practiced writing more extensively. This led to her recognition in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and digital content. She possesses versatility in writing stories, debatable topics, politics, social, fashion, entertainment, reviews, fashion and lifestyle. Today she is a children’ book author, she debuted in 2017 with the book ‘Beautiful Inside and Out’ which is a collection of short stories. She launched it with the aim of empowering young girls and boys. She has the dedication to her craft which makes the children believe that they are beautiful inside and out. Same year her juvenile fiction novel, ‘Good Exists in all that Exists’ released. As the title suggests, the book is based around the theme of ‘good overpowering the bad’.  There is a hidden meaning  for every action. The book does not fail to enhance the enchanted experience of the reader.

Beginning of a new year, in 2018 ‘The House of Terry Atterberry’ made it to book-selling portals. Terry’s tales champion hard work, perseverance, honesty and compassion. The riches that kids gain through this book are overcoming fear, not undermining people, understanding no one is perfect, knowing your true friends, and more. The book is a collection of 15 inspiring fables from the life of a fictional character.

Today, 3 books old, and anticipating more, this is Harsha Sheelam for you. You can find her at:

www.facebook.com/harshasheelamm/
www.instagram.com/harshasheelam

The post Guest Post – The Girl with Golden Highlights by Harsha Sheelam appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

Gun Control

by Richard Rensberry

The recent developments on the gun control front have me scratching my head.  Those who will be violent will be violent whether that have a gun or not.  Gun control is the wrong target when it comes to lessening acts of violence, it only serves to create its counterpart; unchallenged and unrestrained violence.  Just look at the unrestrained violence that happened recently in Paris as proof of the illegitimacy of gun control.

The byproduct of gun control is arms only being in the hands of the violent offensive front, be it criminals, terrorists, drug cartels, governments, you name it.  This end product is the complete opposite of what should be stressed.  What should be stressed is the ownership and skilled use of guns by responsible citizens who would then have the capability to curtail the the irresponsible governmental and criminal elements.  The bad guys will always retain or manufacture weapons no matter if all guns were labeled illegal and taken away from the general citizenry.  

Gun control  results in having the wrong people unarmed.  Law abiding and honest working citizens are the ones that require guns and should be armed to protect themselves, their families and friends, their communities, etc..  Where this ability is absent, there is no freedom from oppression by tyrannical governments and criminal thugs.  For this reason the second amendment to the United States constitution exists, it exists to protect the lives and rights of the people, not the lives and rights of criminals and oppressive governments.  Guns are a vital element in the maintenance of a free society whether one likes it or not.

One Bullet A Poem

We the people within reason

maintain our integrity to defend

our freedom of religion,

ourselves, our families and the constitution

of the United States.  We refuse to bend

when it comes to criminals, political correctness

and the second amendment.

Sane people within reason

believe their Nation

is under God, indivisible

with inalienable rights

and justice for all.

To the republican and the democrat,

to the socialist, liberalist and supreme justices,

to universities and psychiatrists

going weak in the knees on common sense;

until we see higher purpose,

true awakening of judgement and reason

within self, nation and the world,

we will relinquish our guns

one bullet at a time.

The post GUEST POST- Gun Control by Richard Rensberry appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

Feed Your Brain

by Janita Lawrence

I want to stick a fork in my eye when people tell me they ‘love reading’ but just don’t have the time. Life is so bloody exciting with all this sitting at my desk and looking at the Facebook and the Twitter. I get it. Who has time for anything anymore?

I want to take you (firmly, but not unkindly) aside. Your brain is starving, I want to say.Your brain is like the carnivorous plant in the Little Shop of Horrors.

I know all that! I can hear you yelling from behind your smarty-pants handheld devices. I know it’s good for me but where do I find the TIME? Well, here are some lifestyle hacks that will up your reading consumption, which will in turn help me to keep my eyeballs intact.

You’re welcome.

The post GUEST BLOG: Feed Your Brain by Janita Lawrence appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

by Susanne Leist

I was asked to contribute an article to a fellow author’s blog. At first I panicked. I didn’t know what to write about. I’m a listener. I listen to other people’s stories. I’m a good listener. I don’t like speaking about myself. Therefore, I don’t like to write about myself. But now that I’m a writer, I have to move into the spotlight.

I’ve done a few interviews on fellow authors’ blogs. Their questions helped to serve as guidelines. Now I have a blank page to deal with. Should I write about why I had decided to become a writer? I don’t think so. It has been done to death by writers. I believe I will write about what had inspired me to pursue my career in Finance. It wasn’t a ‘what’ but a ‘who;’ the person who I had looked up to and then had lost too early in life. This was my brother, Neil Leist.

Neil was the type of person who lit up a room when he entered it. He was 6’2”, but it wasn’t his height that drew others’ eyes. It was his dynamic personality and his intelligence. Those grey eyes mirrored his great intellect and capacity for greatness. He acted as my father when my father wasn’t home but working long days and nights driving a taxi. He took care of my blind mother until I was old enough to help out. He sheltered me as much as he could from life and responsibilities. He shouldered these burdens himself.

He did well in college but he flourished in the business world. He traded on the Commodity Exchange until he had enough money to take over a Fortune 500 company. With a majority share in its stock, he took over American Bakeries. Taystee Bread was never going to be the same. He took me along on his ride to stardom. I worked for him on the Exchange and in his offices on Madison Ave. in Manhattan. I majored in Finance at New York University, preparing to join him. All was going well for once in my life and in my brother’s life. My parents were proud. He helped them out. All was perfect until that awful phone call in the middle of the night.

My lights went out. All the light in the world was gone for me. I was stuck in darkness as dark and deep as the one my mother lived in. My brother had been in a car accident in the Hamptons. His fancy, red Porsche had hydroplaned on the wet roads. Neil was a great driver with quick reflexes. He drove the car off the road and onto the grass. Luck wasn’t with him. A truck was parked in his path and the Porsche crashed beneath it.

Neil was in a coma for two years before he passed away. Meanwhile, his so-called friends at American Bakeries were undermining his position at the company causing the stock price to drastically plummet. We had to sell off his investment in one big chunk at a big loss. Most of his money was tied up with this company. I spent eight years dealing with all the vermin or finance people and lawyers before his estate could be settled.

I lost my taste for high Finance. I did get an M.B.A. in Finance but it soon lost its appeal to me. I wasn’t cutthroat. I wasn’t a back stabber. I wanted an interesting job that was challenging. I did enjoy working at The Office of Management and Budget at City Hall. I wasn’t able to work the overtime hours on Saturdays because of my Sabbath, so I left.

I worked at different companies, such as: E.F. Hutton & Co., McCall Pattern Company, and at local brokerage firms on Long Island where I now live. None of these jobs appealed to me. I was married with two beautiful daughters. I devoted myself to them. I took on part-time jobs, but I was always available if they needed me.

The big 50 was approaching and I was beginning to feel that I had lost out on life. My brother and then both my parents had passed away. My daughters were beginning their own lives. I needed a focus, a reason for my life. I was helping my daughter write an essay for college. I read it over and was surprised that I had written it. It related to my mother being blind with dementia in a nursing home. I began to think about writing.

My mid-life crisis book, The Dead Game, took me ten years to write. I hadn’t realized that writing was so hard. Characters have to move around and speak at the same time. They can’t sound the same. Through all the rewrites, the plot and story remained the same. Only the dialogue and grammar changed. I believe I could edit for the rest of my life and still not be satisfied.

I found a self-publisher, who offered to print and edit the book for a set price. Anything else costs extra. If I made any changes to the book after it was published, it would cost hundreds of dollars for them to take care of it. They even charged to send the changes to Amazon and Nook, even though these companies don’t charge for this.

One day, the publisher informed me that my book was published. I thought that this meant it was printed. Not only was it printed, it was sitting on Amazon and Nook without a description or bio. It looked sad. I panicked. I had to learn how to use Google so I could ask it how to describe a book. I learned about the log line and synopsis. I bought books on grammar and editing. I opened blogs. I found Facebook and Twitter. Luckily, I found some nice authors who helped me with my countless questions.

My book looked nice on the sites, but it didn’t have reviews. I soon learned that without reviews there are no sales. I joined Goodreads.com to find reviewers. I was placed in review groups, where the members randomly reviewed other members’ books but not each other’s books. Some authors gave nice reviews with constructive criticism. Others took apart my book, piece by piece, and in detail described what was wrong with it. They even used excerpts. These hurt, but I used the reviews to fix any weak spots in my book. After a year of this, I put out a new edition of my book. I tried to address everyone’s concerns. But you just can’t please everyone.

My book is now sitting comfortably in its sections: Vampire Suspense on Amazon and Paranormal Suspense on Nook. I will continue to promote it online while I begin to work on book 2 of The Dead Game series.

My life has taken many unexpected twists and turns. I wonder what the young me would have thought if she had heard that she was going to write vampire stories in the future. Would she have laughed? Would she have been surprised? Knowing me so well, I wouldn’t have laughed or wouldn’t have been surprised. And I might have even been happy. I don’t believe I was so happy with Finance, even in the beginning. I did it as more of a challenge. I wanted to do well in a male-dominated field—just to prove that I could do it. And now I have a new mission. I want to prove to myself that I could be a good author. And I believe I’m well on my way.

The post GUEST POST- A Little About Me by Susanne Leist appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

by Aubrey Leaman

The post GUEST POST: How Numbers Can Tell Stories by Aubrey Leaman appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

(post by Emmie)

How would it feel to be a literary character?

I’ll admit, At Swim-Two-Birds wasn’t an easy book to read. The first time I tried it I only got halfway before I gave up. I hardly understood a word of it. Nevertheless, I would like to argue that it is an amazing novel. It took me a very thorough second attempt (differently coloured pencils in hand) to unravel the ways in which this book plays with literary conventions, crosses intertextual boundaries and blurs different layers of reality.

At Swim-Two-Birds is a novel of many levels. It begins with an unnamed student who enjoys inventing stories. He creates the author Dermot Trellis. Trellis then starts writing a story of his own, for which he creates his main villain John Furriskey. Furriskey, however, also has a life outside of the story that Trellis writes. He lives in a cottage with the woman he loves and isn’t a villain at all. Trellis orders all of his characters to live with him in order to keep an eye on them, but they drug him so he falls asleep and they can do whatever they want. The story folds upon itself even further when one of the characters begins to write a story about Trellis…

A separate realm of fiction

Most of the other characters in Trellis’ story are drawn from other (fictional) books. Trellis’ characters describe what it was like to star in a cowboy book, or interact with heroes from Irish folktales. In his story, the student experiments with the idea of an alternate universe where all fictional characters live. All authors take characters from this limbo and only create a new persona when they fail to find a suitable one that already exists. This means that characters are interchangeable between books. As you might have guessed already, the fact that all fictional characters, including Trellis, who is a character in the student’s story, come from the same realm adds to the blurring of boundaries within the novel.

Metafiction

At Swim-Two-Birds is a clear example of metafiction. This term is used to describe comments on the fictionality and/or construtiveness of a story. When a character mentions that he is only a character or when a book shows that it is only a book it becomes metafictional. Michael Ende’s The Never Ending Story, Miguel de Unamuno’s Mist and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House are examples of this. They feature a boy who creates a book by reading it, a man who argues with his author about whether or not he should kill himself and a world made of ink. These constant reminders that what we are reading is fictional destroy the aesthetic illusion that most other novels try to establish: they do not try to suck us into their world or make us forget that what we read isn’t really happening. Though this may seem to weaken a story, when used properly it only adds to the strength of the book. Our attention is widened from only paying attention to the storyline to also observing the ways in which the book is constructed.

This allowed me to admire the way in which O’Brien plays with the different levels of the novel. He starts by setting up five separate levels and then slowly lets them bleed through each other or form parallels. I also really enjoyed the way in which he showed the fictional nature of his characters by giving them ‘ordinary lives’ outside the stories they star in. They  behaved abnormally by being more ordinary than most characters, and thus raised a lot of questions about the boundaries between fiction and reality. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be part of a novel? I know I have.

Moreover, O’Brien plays with many literary conventions. He parodies newspaper journalism and other forms of style, attacks the position of the author as a god-like power and shows that there are certain ways in which we expect characters (such as the allegedly black villain) to behave. Throughout the novel he continued to surprise and unsettle me.

Ultimately, it would be impossible for me to say everything there is to say about At Swim-Two-Birds without presenting you with a 6000 word essay. And even then, I believe you will find even more interesting ideas and passages in the text than I could tell you about. I can recommend this book to anyone who is up for a rewarding challenge. It will not disappoint.

The above post is contributed by Emmie. She loves reading books, poetry and writing about them in the form of reviews and other posts and expressing her love for fiction. You can read her writing on her blog- Another Night of Reading.

The post GUEST BLOG- At Swim-Two-Birds by Emmie appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

by Snigdha Nautiyal

It is strange really, how easy it is to write on my own blog and how nail-bitingly nerve-wracking to think of something good when you’re writing a guest post! This is my first and for weeks now I’ve had absolutely no idea how to capture the elusive bird of an idea that was floating around in my head. So I decided to just dive in and pretend I was talking to myself (that’s what bloggers do, anyway).

The world of fiction, with all its truths and untruths, appeals to something ethereal within us. It is hard to call the love of books anything else but a worship of the written world. Sometimes, I wonder why there is a power in the universe that urges me to pick up the stories of other people, most of whom never even existed, and to cry real tears for them! Something triggered a thought process inside my head, compelling me to think about how books shape the ways in which we see the world. This makes it important to pick up the right kind of books. Whatever we perceive of reality, is ultimately a story we are writing in our own head. That is a horrifying thought: our life could be a novel! And when someone else would read it, how would they see it?

They would judge it subjectively. They would love us or hate us. Our truths would no longer be objective, the experiences that lead us in certain directions  will be judged as fuzzy notions that made us do something ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. When we read an autobiography for example, we see an author’s life through his eyes.  We see what he saw when he was living through a particular epoch but when we process what we read in our mind, we might draw an entirely different conclusion from the one he did! Since this is just one of the many things fiction has taught me, I decided to share a small reading list here. These books, with their sometimes exaggerated dimensions, are a great way to explore the space warping that makes us see hidden things in mundane, everyday life and to create out of them the most poignant, tragic, beautiful, inspiring and powerful stories that continue to shape our world:

• The Brothers Karamazov: This Russian epic by Fyodor Doestoyevsky is one of the most spectacular books I have ever read. It may be a long-winded read but it is resplendent with the perfect characterization, a suspenseful plot which unwinds into allegorical philosophy. It may not be for the faint-hearted but it is worthwhile the thirty-odd days it may take to read it (assuming you plan on keeping your day job/attending your classes).

• Kafka on the Shore: The first book on this list is a book by Haruki Murakami. This is the story of a boy and an old man, connected by a strange thread in contemporary Japan. It is a remarkably bizarre story infused with supernatural elements but reading this book was like floating through your own subconscious and confronting the blurry stuff that dreams are made of.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude: This book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is far more bizarre than the first one on this list, if that is even possible! I wouldn’t want to venture so far as to offer any sort of a synopsis of this book, with its strange descriptions of rather important topics such as peace, love, war, hatred, corruption, death. Mysticism is entrenched in every part of this book and the hardest part is getting through the family tree because every second person is addressed by a variation of the same name!

• Catch 22: Witty, dark and frustratingly humorous, this is a book that could make you cry and laugh at the same time. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller is about the simple truth that there is no out! Everyone should read it at one point or the other during their lifetime and understand how truly common insanity really is.

So this is it: a small list of books that I think does a wonderful job at distorting reality and making us see a little something different through pure exaggeration and beautifully metaphorical prose. I’m not necessarily implying that you would like any or all of these books; they’re just great for learning. And finally, a big thank you to my fellow blogger Aman, for giving me this chance to guest-blog. Here’s to toasting that his voracious appetite for books may never diminish and he may keep consuming them at the speed of light!

Check out Snigdha’s Blog– Blue Loft

The post GUEST POST- How Reading Dissolves Reality and Reconstructs Structures by Snigdha Nautiyal appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

by Matthew Ruddle

Mrs P’s Journey by Sarah Hartley

Phyllis got lost in London. We’ve all been there. Lost in a big city, trying to find that little, hidden gem a friend told us about, going around in circles, walking down the wrong side street, and ending up in a dead-end. We retrace our steps, double-check the street names, and somehow, accidentally, find our destination. Finding your way around an American city, for example, isn’t too bad, due to the way the streets are set out in a systematic grid system, but in older European cities, like London, the streets are unpredictable and haphazard, with complete disregard for logic or common sense.

These days, help is readily at hand; we can check our phones, use sat nav, or click on a website and find the way to our destination in a matter of seconds. However, Phyllis Pearson didn’t have the technologies of today when she got lost in London in the 1930s. There wasn’t even a street map available to help her.

Phyllis, who? I hear you ask. Well, she had an unremarkable name, but lived an extraordinary life, and founded one of the UK’s most famous and recognizable brands. Phyllis Pearson, the Mrs. P of the book’s title, created the world’s bestselling map of London, the A-Z. She literally walked all of London’s 23,000 streets, by herself, during the course of one year, to make a new map of London, to help people find their way around the city. Her company, Geographers’ Map Company, was founded in 1936 and is still going strong today: http://www.az.co.uk

However, this book isn’t really about the A-Z publishing phenomenon. Sarah Hartley captivates the reader with Phyllis’ life story, from the moment her father first met her mother, through childhood and boarding school, her many adventures abroad, and her chaotic family life. The very fact that Phyllis survived being raised by her two extremely mismatched parents would be an achievement enough; indeed, the story of her parents’ explosive marriage would have made a remarkably entertaining and engaging story all by itself, without Phyllis ever being mentioned. The author herself says that, at times, Phyllis’s life story seems too unbelievable to be true. It reads like an engaging novel rather than a straight forward biography, with so many sudden changes in circumstance. As a child, Phyllis receives a baby elephant as a birthday present, which indicates how wealthy her parents had become, but later she finds herself homeless in Paris, sleeping rough on the streets and rummaging for stale bread to eat, dipping it in fountains to make it more edible.

The author blurs lines between fact and fiction, choosing to write imagined conversations and created scenes, alongside quotations from Phyllis herself, and text taken from letters and telegrams between Phyllis and her family. Some readers might become frustrated at Hartley’s storytelling style, but I enjoyed the ways in which the story is so vividly bought to life. The author expertly guides the reader through the colorful twists and turns, creating a rich and entertaining map of Phyllis’ extraordinary life.

Mrs P’s Journey is one worth taking.

Written by Matthew Ruddle, author of the following blogs:

 Libraries and Education

 Departures travel blog

The post GUEST POST- Mrs P’s Journey by Matthew Ruddle (A Book Review) appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

by KENDI GLORIA

She stands aloof, the sun is adamant on making her feel its presence. It is well past evening, yet it is still intent on piercing through the clouds with its ray and its optimism. Perhaps symbolic that she needs a little more optimism. It refuses to neither set nor leave the moon to its domain. She sees the train from far. It looks like a stream of water from the taps. Nay, water flowing from a dam. It dangles playfully on the railway line, making sounds that seem like mourning, for the weight it carries. It clunks and clatters, “ching”.  When the train finally stops, she is thankful to her gods because she now has a valid excuse to walk away from the stranger insisting on a small chitchat while moving towards her. His mouth stinks anyway. Every time he opens his mouth, she tilts her head only slightly to avoid the warm, moist stench hitting her nose. She had rather be alone.

It is only when she has sat down that she realizes she is worn. She feels vulnerable at the very thought of her journey’s final destination. She inhales a plunge of fresh air, shuts her eyes and imagines she is suffocating herself with the air kept bay by her tightly shut lips. What if she doesn’t let it out? Her throat begs for mercy and she wills herself to let the air out though reluctantly. She opens her eyes. The world is still in existence; for one second of guilt she allows herself to think she is better off gone than at her Aunt’s house again. The world would spin around the moon anyway. Or was it the sun? She cares less. She snaps out of it and focuses on the journey ahead. She is terrified, and she is sure her voice will tremble if she lets out a sound. She makes a resolution to be quiet the whole journey. 

The train is crammed. She is seated put in the third class compartment. She likes it here. It somehow reminds her of where she is from, reminds her of the gutter. It makes her feel alive, the hustle, the bustle, and the mundane conversations. She is nostalgic. She observes people pushing and shoving, laying their humanity aside even for a while. It is all about who gets the seats, the rest stand and have to keep on moving for others to alight as if balancing themselves on a moving train is not hard enough. Some men have stood, awkwardly balancing their feeble bodies with their hands that hang on the rail. Arms held high up to reveal yellow patches of sweat stains on their underarms. They are workers at the quarry nearby and they are probably headed to even smaller homes. Theirs is a life characterized by children in tattered clothes, wives with layers and layers of body fat, for that is to them beauty and also sleepless nights on mattresses too thin.

She judged the women in the compartment a little too harshly. To her they were just women with no drive whatsoever. There was nothing she loathed more than a woman lacking ambition.  Judging from their conversations she wasn’t so far off from the truth. She heard one call out to another about the City women’s pride because their children went to school while theirs went fishing. Another one yet, “I can’t survive a day in the City that life is just not for me, imenikataa”.  She wondered how their lives fulfilled them. How comfortable they were in their skins that reeked solely of fish. Most of them were fish vendors, a few decent traders and a minority of them sex workers. She’d distinguish a sex worker patently. The way their movements were calculated, the bushing of eyes, the careful pout of lips when they talked, the slow walking and the timbre of their voices; teasing. After all she went through her tailoring school with a sex worker’s money, almost the only thing her aunt provided for her. She is aware too she is being condescending, but she lets it show anyway.

Instantly, she realizes how lucky she has been to be blessed with brains. She liked the fact that people found her beauty appealing but would feign modesty when complimented of having something between her ears.

Trees pass by fast, one after another. Then they give way to twigs, a semi arid area which she knows oh too well. Her insides overturn. She knows she is almost there. She wouldn’t have come if it were not for the distressed call from her niece, or rather she is consoling herself. When she was leaving, the future had promising prospects; she would marry Abu and live happily ever after. She thought. She would then rid herself of anything that reminded her of her dark days. This unfortunately comprised her family, most importantly her aunt and her uncle.

However she was not warned of the challenges that would follow. She therefore was not prepared for the fighting with Abu. Almost every day he would come home with a bone to pick with her. And when she heard speculations that Abu had a mistress, her heart was battered. When she confronted Abu, she loathed the way Abu admitted too easily to infidelity. She loathed, also, the way he had expected forgiveness too easily. She knew she wanted to leave. She had every reason to; she had been contemplating leaving for so long a time but she had never resolved to. Now however, she had resolved to leave, but where to? Abu was her salvation and without him, she’d probably lose the little she had. She hated that she had come to depend too much on someone for her own existence. She reminded herself she had gone through enough hells to consider this one. She stayed, he changed.

And with time she settled in to the rhythm of life in the City. Their first house was a shanty. And she’d sew one clothe after another, for the children of the neighbor, for the watchmen at night, for Abu even and for anyone who was willing to pay her right. She would stay up at night and match colors, red into black, green into blue until she was contented with how each complimented the other. Gradually time passed. They told her time would heal all her wounds. Time was relative she knew, but she permitted herself to hope. She would not dwell in despondency. Six years later she was still scratching off the scab to open, a fresh, each time, the wounds inflicted on her by her uncle and aunt. Bygones never really remained bygones.

To think she is on her way to see them….She lets out another sigh. She is not sure of herself. And six years later she has redeemed herself from the shame associated with living in a shanty, Six years later she is still with Abu, six years later she has conceived a being into the world and six years later she is better off than she has ever been.

However six years was still not enough to make faded the burns from the water her aunt poured on her for taking too long at the shop, six years would never be enough to erase memories of defilement, six years is certainly not time enough for the nightmares tormenting her at night to cease, six years was never known to be long enough to heal a crushed soul, one that died just as soon as it blossomed.

But six years meant something to her, she had matured and it was time she set some creases straight. She was off from the train with a new resolve. She had learnt, she is mature….She is swollen with hope.

Author’s Bio:

My name is Gloria Kendi Nanua. I am a second year student at Strathmore University pursuing Bachelor of Business Science-Finance option. I have an overwhelming passion for literature; I enjoy both reading and writing. I am more drawn towards African Literature though mainly because I can relate with it in more ways than imaginable. My favorite writers are quite obviously Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo, Zukiswa Warner and Okwiri Oduor; all of them women. I really should start reading male authors. Suggestions? My best book this far is Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda. The link to my blog is flimsysoul.com. I hope you enjoy reading this piece.

The post GUEST POST- She Stands Aloof by Kendi Gloria appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

How are y’all doing?

I am looking for five Guest Bloggers for the posting months June to October, one for every month. I have already hosted three guest bloggers this s year, and I feel connecting with fellow bloggers is working well for me. Here the bloggers and their blog posts:

Hán Ruì yà– Living in the Language Silently

AVINASH GUPTA– The Joy of Discovery

SHWATE TANEJA– Five Procrastinations of Writing

For Contact Details on the Guest Blogger Program see here.

Feel free to contact me.

The post Guest Bloggers WANTED appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.