Ignorance. Innocence. Patience.
Mummy has always
been the lil one of the house. Literally.
She is the first to
receive raised voices.
The first to find
lost things.
The first to forget
and forgive.
The first to cry,
the first to laugh.
The first beauty of
our home.
Last night I was
fighting with her!
“I want the whole
bed to myself. Go sleep with your darling” - I said.
“Oh I din’t want
you to sleep alone” – she said.
The night before,
her face vivid with contours, a faint picture of her underlying facial skull,
her eyes deepened in the hollow, surrounded by the over tinge of darkness, her
complexion freckled, her strands whiter than never. She’s changed! She’s old.
In a matter where I
jus blinked my eye, where I jus pulled her down the sands of Poovar, where I’ve
envied her sun polished zwai of her skin. She did not pass her genes.
She looks at a
random picture from an old album I’ve put together and says “evlo quuut, antha
kuzhi vizhundha romba athirshtam.” Picture – me as a toddler, with an evident
grin, revealing a pair of burrows deeply set on either side of my once idli
cheeks. Unfaded, the furrows still exist to date, less attractive!
It’s a deformity
ma, I thought. You’ve given birth to a daughter of deformities, including the
deformity of not having your zwai gene. Enna lucky????
I pondered.
A journey through a
land of sly rain, a land of unravelling chill, a land of muddled scientists, a
land of historical secrets, a land of oversize… and still brings me back to
you, dad, the family that beckons. Yes I am lucky.
A journey through
perpetual argue of decisions, chaotic emotions, silent fights, love and letting
go…. And still back to revisiting them all, coz I never learn, Yes I am lucky.
