The Discovery
The pen is slipping from her hand and she is not able to write anything. The clock is ticking, ten minutes to go, and she is not yet done writing her exam. The examiner snatches her answer sheet. She is trembling with fear of failing the exam.
Suddenly, she is in an open field and running aimlessly with no destination in mind, losing sight of the world she left far behind, breathing heavily and finally mystically flying in the sky.
Hypnic jerk it was!, she realized, and woke up from this terrible dream. She took a sip of water from the bottle kept on the floor at the side of her bed. It was a hot night, with the fan on the ceiling of her room spinning at the speed as of Venus's about it axis!
Dawn broke and with a heavy heart she telephoned her parents once again. "This is the only thing you are supposed to do. You have spent 6 years in the medical school, and now you are refusing to pursue the profession?" yelled her dad. The misery she had been going through was the result of the conventional society norms of having a 'real profession'. They were having a daughter who was a doctor and she was having a life which would haunt her with the nightmares, like she had that night.
" We have made you a doctor. You will have all the respect in the society and good alliances for marriage have already started coming," they continued. They were not wrong, but it was hard for her to make them understand that not everyone was born to fit into the conventions of society. She was an exception and this belief was unacceptable to them. She had to choose: either her happiness or theirs. She decided to live and not just survive.
Today, happy faces are being captured by her camera professionally, stethoscope lying untouched in her closet, and 'Home' is just a contact name in her cell phone. A doctor had been made, a daughter had been lost, but the true self has been discovered.