Letting Go

A tale of loveless marriage, disease & loss.

- Tanima Ray

Calling Amrinder Bajaj's book - Letting Go - a mere tale of a loveless marriage might be explanatory but still improper or incomplete as how does one live with and stand by a person unless there is no belonging. Love becomes habitual or taken for granted in most marriages. It may not be uttered or emphasised but it surely exists in whichever form it can. Even as a promise or duty.

Bajaj touches a harrowing narrative of a disease we see all around us now - cancer. In a series of diary entries in the first-person narrative, she presents a couple, both of whom are doctors, an obstetrician and her husband, a private practitioner. It is the latter that is inflicted by the ailment in its fourth and final stage.

Like most marriages, this one too has turned bitter over time. And it is perhaps the negligence or busy lives of the two that delayed the diagnosis. Now the wife bears the additional burden of attending her sick partner which she fulfils despite his disregard for her all these years. She records each day of struggle to treat and keep her MS, as she calls him, alive.

What is the most alarming is the series of events where she mentions the apathy of the alopaths who do not care for the patients and extract money in both private and public institutions even when she herself and MS are both doctors. They are forced to adhere to the incorrigible expenses while being on duty themselves, treating others in need.