eFiction India eFiction India Vol.02 Issue.09 | Page 10

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STORIES

BEING SYLVIA

  DEEPTI RAZDAN                                   

Photo Courtesy: thenikonkid, flickr

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VER SINCE I regained consciousness of my existence, I knew something was
wrong with it. Although life had always been pretty generous to me, I was never
truly happy. I had a wonderful set of highly intelligent parents, who reserved
a perfectly secure, luxurious life for me, even before I was born. They were both highly
loved, highly sought after Professors of English Literature at one of the most prestigious
universities in the country. Their passion for the subject made sure they always excelled
at their job. My father was the youngest Head of the Department at his university, while
my mother had published over thirty books even before her age reached that glorious
number. Needless to say, their friends were all fellow academics who were as crazy about
literature and philosophy as my parents. They even formed a formally informal club
together, which they pompously called ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, inspired by the group
of Modernist writers they ardently admired.
So, I believe you can imagine the kind of life I was exposed to since childhood. Obviously,
I was never really a child. I was expected to march straight from infancy to adulthood, on
the red carpet strewn with pages of Modernist literature carefully picked by my parents,
without any stops in between. My sister and I were always asked to sit and witness The
Bloomsbury Group’s gatherings, to receive the right kind of ‘conditioning’. Usually I just
sat there as a silent audience as all the literature ‘connoisseurs’ bored me with their monologues all night long. I don’t know why, but I could never connect with literature the way