Born in the heart of Chhattisgarh, in Durg’s familiar embrace.
I entered a world of silver spoons, of luxury, wealth, and grace.
Abundance was built on ancestral toil, a cushioned and safe domain, yet deep inside, a silent void grew—of worthlessness, doubt, and pain. Through schoolyard days to the twelfth standard, the world felt hollow and bleak. A child surrounded by everything, yet searching for what to speak. While others showed off their pencils of two, an entire stationery set was mine. They envied the wealth but pushed me away, outcasting the golden sign.
Defaulting to ethics, I held back my joy, convinced I deserved no prize. If grades couldn’t match the abundance I had, I shrank in the family’s eyes. Compared to a cousin whose brilliance was clear, my ceiling was set at sixty, an invisible cage where the voices of others decided my fate and fixed me. I learned to depend, I learned to look up to elders who claimed they knew best. They measured my meals, my words, and my steps, while leaving my spirit suppressed. Too busy with the burdens of family lines to notice the child slipping through, I became a blamer of circumstance, for nothing I lived felt true.
Then came a moment of reckless resolve, a desperate choice to break free. I chose the hard path of the gruelling CA to prove what a failure could be. The entrance arrived on the ultimate day we bid my grandfather goodbye, I cleared through the borders, a bittersweet win under a mourning sky.
But a father’s sharp words said I’d never suffice, a sting that brought deep remorse, yet I saw it as code, an ancestral sign, to follow this turbulent course. Three years drifted by in a fog of despair, the heavy weight dragging me down, I dropped the CA, I failed the BCom, and lost my identity's crown.
The women of old murmured in my ear, "Go learn how to cook and to clean." An aunt threw her tantrums, a mother loved deeply but worried for what was unseen.
At the edge of the dark, with a heart full of shadows, a terrifying thought arose, but a father’s quick call for a marriage arranged jolted me out of my close. I fought for an MBA, analysed deeply, scored ninety on logic alone, and battled my father to choose my own path, rejecting his safe, structured zone. Though seizures had shaken my physical frame, and Bipolar cast its shade, I stood at the interview, shivering, raw, and revealed how my spirit was made.
Accepted and chosen, a spark was ignited, a purpose not driven by gold, for cash was no crush; I wanted it crushed, for a world where emotions hold fold. I finished my diplomas, worked through internships, and stepped into the corporate space, but the boundaries of managers, orders, and rules were things I could never embrace. I collapsed once again, with no tangible skill, a bundle of failure professed, but Vaibhav, my brother, a gem in this world, saw the deeply distressed soul. "Go find a good man who will love you," he said, "and seek an upliftment anew." So I met with the suitors and spoke my mind, exposing the true wounds.
They drifted away when I spoke of my storms, intimidated by the real, until came a man with no riches or looks, who promised with love he would heal. I married and shifted to Mumbai’s vast sea, and learned how to fold and to clean, I ironed and dusted and cooked with a smile, performing a role unforeseen. But my bank was my father’s, my funding his choice, and the answers were consistently "No,"
The first year, I gave more than ever required, while absorbing the heaviest blow. When sickness took over, they sent me back home, a pilgrimage made of defeat, A cycle repeating of breaking apart, then finding my parents' retreat.
I tried at the office, but rants tore me down, underperforming and fired. I tried at a school for the kindergarten youth, but "why do you earn?" they inquired. Work from home failed due to a lack of an hour; a boutique of fine clothes had to close, Events management collapsed into dust, as the mountain of failures arose. Then, finally, silence—they looked at my face, satisfied that my body looked well, but broke from within, where identity screams, I inhabit a trauma-bound hell. Where duty is one-sided, demands are so high, and living is costly and grand,
Where keeping an ambition is labelled a crime, how can I continue to stand?
So here is the crossroads, thirty-two years, where the final tough choices abide: To cling to a trauma-bond, uselessly hoping the waters will turn with the tide, or return to my parents, to safety and strength, where shelter and bread are assured, to rebuild my foundations, unhindered by fear, with independence completely secured. The nitty-gritty of aiming is clear to me now; the people and places can bend, for Naina Somani, through Taparia and Maheshwari, has reached a transformative end. The cards are now turning, the light shining bright through the smoke of the older creator,
Step forward, O Neyna—the spirit reborn, the powerful, sovereign Tarot Reader.