DOSSIER: VARUNA JARITA SHEKTAR
IT WAS BAD ENOUGH BEING YET ANOTHER DAUGHTER IN A family of four girls and only one boy. Being bright and physically attractive only made things worse. Being a dark-skinned Hindu young woman growing up in Melbourne among fair-haired Aussie males who were either tongue-tied around women or aggressively machismo did not help matters, either.
In grammar school the teachers called out her name as it was written in their records: V. J. Shektar. The other children immediately dubbed her Vijay and she happily adopted the name, more comfortable with it than Varuna Jarita, the names her parents had given her.
Her mother had dedicated her as a baby to the powerful goddess Sakti, whose name means “energy.” In the teeming Hindu pantheon, Sakti embodies both virginal innocence and bloodthirsty destruction: both an eternal virgin and the goddess of illicit pleasures.
Her father largely ignored her except to worry about where he could find the money for still another dowry on his slender salary as a CPA in a small accounting agency whose clientele was almost exclusively local Indian business firms.
The family’s youngest daughter, she was born with spirit. Her mother tried to instill maidenly virtues in Vijay while her older sisters started dating and then, one by one, dropped out of secondary school to get married and start having babies of their own. Her one brother went on to college, his father’s pride.
Vijay refused to quit her classes and find a husband. When her father threatened to beat some obedience into her, she left home and lived on her own with several friends, working nights in restaurants or video stores or anyplace that would hire an earnest, honest high school senior who had no intention of letting any man seduce her.
She went on to Melbourne University on the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, promising to repay the state most of her college expenses out of her income after she graduated. Still living on her own, she easily qualified for a medical school scholarship. Her mother despaired of her ever getting married and starting a proper family. Her father succumbed to cancer in her final school year, admitting only on his death bed that he was proud of what she had accomplished.
By the time Vijay was doing her internship in the university hospital she had learned that sex Can be used not merely for fun, but for power. Usually, she chose fun, although often enough she enjoyed wielding the power that sex lent her. While most of her female friends complained that Australian men were “either boors or boobs,” Vijay found that there were plenty of intelligent and thoughtful men in her world. Most of them were shy, at first, but that merely added to their charm, as far as she was concerned. For Vijay, sex was a way of learning rather than an all-consuming passion. She enjoyed the power it gave her, and she kept her freedom to choose who, and when, and what she wanted.
She got hurt, of course; more than once. But by the time she began practicing emergency medicine in the rundown hospital of the St. Kilda neighborhood where she had grown up, she considered herself an experienced woman of the world.
Unfortunately, she fell deeply in love with an older man, a physician who was already married. Vijay found that even a woman of the world can be tripped up by an urbane, well-to-do scoundrel who tells lies convincingly. By the time she finally faced the truth, she knew she had to get away from this man, away from Melbourne, away from Australia entirely. And she knew she would never again allow love to overwhelm her.
Her trip to California started as a vacation, a time to heal her emotional wounds and get some fresh air into her lungs. She stayed five years, starting a new career in space medicine. First with the American NASA and then with Masterson Aerospace Corporation, Vijay became a specialist in the effects of low gravity on the human body and mind.
She spent three ninety-day tours on space stations and was thinking about signing up for a year at Moonbase when she heard about the Second Mars Expedition.
Vijay Shektar won the position of physician/psychologist for the expedition. It was not easy. She had to prove herself in surgery, radiation medicine and even emergency dentistry. The competition was very exacting. But she won. Even though she promised herself she would not sleep with any of the decision-makers, she won the appointment anyway.
For Vijay had learned how to go after what she wanted. And she knew that if she worked hard enough, used all her strength and skills, she could usually get what she wanted.
The trick was to know what she wanted. That was the difficult part.
She thought of her patron goddess often. Love and destruction, the twin and inseparable attributes of Sakti. She did not believe in the ancient religion, but she was certain that love carried with it a terrible destructive power, a power that she was determined to keep from hurting her again.