Shefali’s mother-in-law was shouting at the top of her voice, “She broke his Sim Card”, when Shefali’s father opened the door. Shefali was standing in a corner of the long lobby of her house – the house that had seen many ups and downs, many moments of happiness and gloominess in the past one year.

That one year, the year being 2014, had proven to be a turning point in Shefali’s life. The relations, whom she trusted more than anything else, seemed to have lost meaning. The words now spoken by her husband and her in-laws felt to her as coming straight from the Devil’s mouth. It was till last year when Shefali’s home was the most peaceful place for her where every moment spent with her family was a blissful moment, oblivious of the impending storms in her life.

Time is a great player. It plays with the destinies of the people and enjoys the outcome. The people, on the other hand, remain a puppet with a little control in their hands, and often times none at all.

It was August 14, 2014 when it all started. Seven months pregnant Shefali was simply looking into her husband’s phone when she chanced upon an SMS which looked something not so normal. She asked her husband but he gave faulty replies as if hiding something from her. Well, the message in the phone wasn’t clear enough to hold him responsible for any misconduct out of marriage but his strange replies were.

Things took a sad turn when he confirmed an extra-marital affair with a woman he had known for quite some time. The news came as a big bolt from the blue for Shefali but her husband was unmoved. She fell to the ground, sobbing, unable to comprehend the situation. But he never held out his hand to comfort her. She was thinking of her future without a husband and he was perhaps thinking of a new life without her.

“The relationship with you was long over.” She heard him saying. Oh! Then why did he never tell her earlier? What was this compromise all about? And what a perfect timing! Now that Shefali was seven months pregnant, she certainly would have no choice left but to accept her fate.

But he was wrong. Shefali fought back though it took her five more years to get back her strength but she finally did learn to live without any expectations from her husband. Yes, she did cry for some time for the shock was too much to bear. But not for long.

The day 14th August, became a landmark in her life – the turning point!

She was angry. Very angry. She had bouts of anger at times and sometimes she would start crying inconsolably suddenly. Her husband would never care to soothe her for he was the only reason for her present situation. She lost interest in food and ignored her health. Her eyesight was severely affected because of incessant crying for days and days together.

Her mother-in-law was called in to help solve the problem. Shefali felt that, being a woman herself, she would understand. But she was shocked to see that her mother-in-law, after some initial show-off of sympathy, turned in favour of her son. She rather started a different type of planning. She had never liked the ambitious, independent-thinking attitude of Shefali. She always wanted an obedient follower-type daughter-in-law. Now, in the present situation, she could sense an opportunity to get rid of the present daughter-in-law and replace her with another, more docile one.

“Why don’t you leave us alone? You go away from here. We will take care of the children. We don’t need you,” was what she told Shefali one day, in March 2015.  And now Shefali was left all alone with none to turn to.

Until her delivery in October 2014, she did not tell anything about the ongoing situation to her parents. But then, the situation was getting beyond her control and she talked to them. She called them immediately when her mother-in-law threatened to throw her out of her own home in March 2015. Her father rushed in as soon as he heard. When he reached Shefali’s house, her husband and her mother-in-law were shouting at her.

Shefali was in a bad shape. She looked like some mental patient who was yelling at her husband and trying to make him understand what she wanted to say but he seemed not willing to listen to her. “I will talk to her. Do what you can,” her husband was warning her. And this was enough to enrage already heart-broken Shefali. She took her husband’s phone, threw it with all her might that was left in her, smashed it against the wall, picked up the Sim Card and broke it into two.

This proved to be the saturation point for her mother-in-law, who wanted to throw Shefali out of the house that very moment.

But, fortunate enough for Shefali, her father had arrived. And looking at his daughter’s condition, he could take no more. He scolded Shefali’s mother-in-law, who in turn had only one thing to say, “But she broke his Sim Card. How will he work now?”

Her father couldn’t believe his ears, “How is a Sim Card more important than my daughter whose life is on the verge of being ruined?”

Her mother-in-law failed to see her tears, failed to see her love, failed to see her attachment towards her husband as she continuously defended her own son and every now and then would accuse Shefali : “She broke his Sim Card.”