If you believe in fate, you would ascribe unhappiness that abounds in people’s life to fate and no­thing else. ‘They are fated to be unhappy, to be miser­able’, you tell yourself. But if you are not such an abso­lute fatalist, you’d start wondering if it’s human beings themselves who br­ing unhappiness unto their lives.

When I think about them — Azhar Bhai, approach­ing 40, married two years back and now father of a son, Saira Aapa, his sister, a divorcee, in her early 40s and their ailing, widowed mother — I ask myself “Why have they always been such unhappy people?

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