Grief is perhaps the one topic many a book has been written on. There are endless research papers, endless shows, endless whatever medium of entertainment or information you consume that cover grief as a subject. I suppose, after love (and maybe death, though I’m not entirely certain about that one), grief is what has captivated people’s interest the most.

You know about those five stages of grief? Purely academic, I’m sure. Because when you actually find yourself in the deep recess of that unimaginable pain that is grief, you don’t care about the stages. All you see is… bleakness, desolation. That inhospitable desert where no tree grows and no animal can survive. The ground is impenetrable, and the cracks on it lacerate your feet.

In the wake of Anpag’s disappearance, and the fate that befell him, a kind of fracture developed in his parent’s lives. Much of it, as his mother notes in this episode, was self-inflicted; but there is someone else she blames, someone she is mightily angry with.

And that rage won’t subside.