LITERATI AND FINGERPRINT INVITE YOU TO
THE GOA BOOK LAUNCH OF "DAUGHTER BY COURT ORDER " ON SATURDAY 28TH JUNE AT 6.30 P.M. AT LITERATI THE AUTHOR _RATNA VIRA_ WILL BE IN CONVERSATION WITH _KARAN BHAGAT_ DAUGHTER BY COURT ORDER JUST DON'T TALK ABOUT WOMEN EMPOWERMENT. BE THE CHANGE! India Infoline News Team / 11:34, 07-Jun-14 [1] AUTHOR: Ratna Vira _PUBLISHED BY FINGERPRINT_ Fingerprint is delighted to bring to you _Daughter by Court Order _by Ratna, an inspiring and emotional account of a woman who fights her own mother in order to preserve her identity. _Daughter by Court Order _is the tale of one woman's valiant battle against her mother's unjustified and unwarranted vengeance. It's the heart-wrenching tale of her struggle to win back her rights from her mother's manipulative tricks. This is the story of a woman fighting against power, money, deceit, and treachery for her right to be recognized as a daughter. A daughter by court order . . . Ratna holds a masters degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a masters in English Literature from St Stephen's College, University of Delhi and is the daughter of senior journalist Nalini Singh and SPN Singh. ABOUT THE BOOK A seemingly innocuous remark over an innocent cup of tea, and Aranya discovers that her family has been fighting a decade-long legal battle over her grandfather's expansive estate. And all this while, they not only kept her in the dark, but they also kept her very existence out of the court's knowledge! A cesspool of emotions, half-truths, betrayals, and the unspooling of long buried dirty family secrets threaten to overpower Aranya and disrupt what modicum of peace and balance she has in her life as a single mother of two children. At the centre of this storm is the one woman who, ever since the day Aranya was born, has had nothing but curses and abuses for her; who has deliberately kept her name out of the court; who has wished her dead for every day of her life; who refuses to now remember her birth. The woman who is her mother. Her own mother. This is the story of a woman fighting against power, money, deceit, and treachery for her right to be recognised as a daughter. A daughter by court order . . . AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Life changes in a moment, but we don't always see it coming. Aranya, or Arnie as everyone called her, didn't. It was just after eight on a particularly hot summer morning. Angry at being disturbed, the woman did not attempt to hide her annoyance at seeing Arnie. Her tacky nightclothes were in sharp contrast to the ultra chic black chiffon sari flung carelessly on the bed, the blouse merely a string bikini revealing more than it covered and glistening with Swarovski crystals that winked as they caught the light. The flimsy covering was still damp with her perspiration and her perfume taunted Arnie for her naïveté. Arnie thought the woman must have been all smiles, sophisticated and soft-spoken, bejewelled and dressed to kill, at the President's _At__ __Home_. Arnie had seen this played out several times and continued to watch her, mesmerised. Her resemblance to Goddess Kali was striking--large red _bindi_, heavily-_kohled__ _eyes even at this hour, long hair that was flying and blowing out in all directions in the blast of the air conditioner. Strands of hair framed her face like irate serpents, which reminded Arnie of another angry Goddess, this time Medusa from the Percy Jackson movie. Her pencil-thin lips disappeared as she leered, mocking Arnie for asking questions. She was in a terrible rage and Arnie watched as though in a trance, trapped by her hypnotic snake-like eyes. Her words were like physical blows and hurt just as much, but Arnie heard them with a slight delay, like a bad DVD where the lip sync is off by a few seconds. She shouted and hurled abuses, unusually vicious even by her standards, as Arnie watched, stunned and feeling small, dwarfed yet again, her stomach tightening into a ball. In her mind, Arnie had curled into a safe foetal position, covering her face with her hands as she tried to block out the attack. "_Kutiya_!" she screamed. "You want to put your father and me on the road? I am alive and will not let your evil plans succeed. You want him dead? You will not succeed, _haramzadi_. You should have died in that bloody incubator. I would have done it but my father warned me that this would not go unnoticed in France and that bloody social worker person made my life miserable asking all those questions. Then Baby Singh came to get you and made you just like her, the misery of my life. She has gotten her revenge! I am left with an imbecile, an idiot like you, the tragedy of my life. I have important calls to make, the government may fall, the famous director wants to cast me in his next film, but here I am wasting my time with you!" She was shouting so loudly now that Arnie was worried her mother might have a stroke. But she saw then that this was just one of her moods as the woman kept glancing at the large-dial men's watch that looked out of place on her slim, almost emaciated wrist. This was a familiar gesture; making the other person feel that time was important only for one person, her mother. "I know who you are! A troublemaker and a bitch," Arnie's mother said, her voice betraying her feelings while presuming to guess her daughter's reason for standing before her, but not giving Arnie a moment to speak. "Please, if this is about your Stanford, or that Sloan School of whatever, some other time." Arnie had yet to say a word but her mother just went on. "At least let your children go to these new colleges . . . my friend from Ludhiana has set up an air-conditioned campus. Your obsession is with two hundred-year-old universities! Grow up!" Within seconds, she destroyed Arnie's hard-earned academic success, demolishing the oldest colleges in Delhi, hacking at the University of London, and beheading Stanford in the same sentence. "Shrey want to estudy laws at Yay-el and that no good daughter of yours has many talks about going to some Rizvi. Yudi told me." Her accent had lapsed into the familiar Punjabi dialect as she screamed. "Rhode Island School of Design . . . RISD; not Rizvi," Arnie had just begun to say, when her mother barked again. As the woman intended, Arnie was immediately on the defensive and reduced to a blabbering idiot so that whatever had to follow could be said by her mother from a position of strength. Arnie's children were always brought into the conversation to attack her, to whip her for being a single mother, for their bad grades in Hindi. "Look where studying that language, doing that English Honours has got you!" This had the desired effect. Arnie was reduced to an unsure, stammering imbecile as her mother, the _'Bechari Kamini'_, bemoaned her tragic life surrounded by a growing brood of idiots, because she has added Arnie's little children to the many causes of her suffering. She was the victim of Fate and, her tone suggested, had to suffer her one big mistake, Arnie's birth. Links: ------ [1] http://webmail.literati-goa.com/?_task=mail|+|amp|+|_action=show|+|amp|+|_uid=1456|+|amp|+|_mbox=INBOX