This is not your usual fairy tale that begins with ‘once upon a time’ and ends with ‘and they lived happily ever after’. In fact, this is not a fairly tale at all. This is a story of my family’s fight with obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD for short. Through this book, you will get a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors in a family where one member is affected by OCD. To our misfortune, OCD struck my wife, Sonal. It brought out the worst in her since she was under its complete control. That brought out the worst in me because I could see excesses on the part of Sonal that I could not understand and could not deal with maturely. Sonal’s OCD was tenacious, unbeatable, indefatigable. No adjective can do justice to describe the disorder effectively. We have been having a tug o’ war with it for many years now, and for the better part of the game, it has been winning. We have been relentlessly fighting it together, egging each other on, sometimes losing hope, at other times springing back into action. Our peace of mind, happiness, the joys of connubial bliss, the joys of parenthood – all expropriated, all sacrificed at the altar of the disorder. We continue to slog in our efforts to break the OCD monster’s back, which we hope to achieve someday. This story is about our travails.