Kuzhi of Luck

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.