If our birth is deemed as the fountainhead of a mountain, death an ocean, then our life would be akin to a river constantly flowing down the ‘age’ at a constant ‘time’ and speed. Most of the water in my case has already flowed under the bridge, irreversibly like time. However, imagination allows me to scan the whole gamut of childhood, adulthood and retired life at my leisure to recall scores of people who bumped into me in the rites of passage for a particular time only to get replaced by new ones at regular intervals.
Call it a sheer twist of good fortune, or my destiny, the first person in my life has ironically been the ‘last’ one who has continued staying with me selflessly under all conditions thus far; spanning decades as the rest of the faces around kept changing over time. The quantum of effort she’d put in through the ages to ensure her son’s life remained in poise during all his ups and downs is writ large upon her sagging anatomy, conspicuously marked with her deeply wrinkled face, baggy eyes and veined hands. That priceless companion is none other than my octogenarian mother.
One memory is too vivid worth declaring the moment of yesterday; when having got my first job at a meagre salary in a textile factory in Ludhiana, I’d lifted her in my arms spinning round and round in unchecked alacrity. Sitting next to me looking ever so sprightly, she bubbled with unbridled cheerfulness observing my celebratory wedding as I put offerings into the sacred fire unmindful of the real, insidious and volatile designs of the ‘time’. Years later, when I was setting fire to my wife’s pyre, she was still standing by my side though in a starkly contrasting mood.
Not only had my joyous mother wiped my tears when I was a newly ‘born’ baby, but she did the same when I was a newly ‘dead’ adult. Her strengthening presence served as a reminder to a gospel truth that if a wife is the better half, who else could be one’s best half apart from mother. Privy to my innermost thoughts, she took it upon herself to buffer my delicate predicament as having had my own mother alive at my side I was futilely making endeavours to placate the pangs of my children longing for their departed mother. My struggle in vain to come to terms with the sudden loss of my spouse at times turned into frustration and anger that she went on absorbing like sponge to water. If my wholesome identity in my mother’s presence had not perpetually interpreted ‘double’, the double whammy of losing my wife and then my younger brother within a short span would have crushed me to unspeakable, unbearable, and irreparable proportions.
{{/usCountry}}Not only had my joyous mother wiped my tears when I was a newly ‘born’ baby, but she did the same when I was a newly ‘dead’ adult. Her strengthening presence served as a reminder to a gospel truth that if a wife is the better half, who else could be one’s best half apart from mother. Privy to my innermost thoughts, she took it upon herself to buffer my delicate predicament as having had my own mother alive at my side I was futilely making endeavours to placate the pangs of my children longing for their departed mother. My struggle in vain to come to terms with the sudden loss of my spouse at times turned into frustration and anger that she went on absorbing like sponge to water. If my wholesome identity in my mother’s presence had not perpetually interpreted ‘double’, the double whammy of losing my wife and then my younger brother within a short span would have crushed me to unspeakable, unbearable, and irreparable proportions.
{{/usCountry}}Holding a pen to channel my pent-up emotions, I often tend to visualise many wayward and wild things, but immediately rein in my mind daring to imagine how my life might have read without her. Many people will come and go, but mother tends to stay with us right from the time we open our eyes until we close them forever before her, or when she breathes her last. My silent wish goes one way; may my case fall in the former category for, I’ve honestly run out of the willpower to afford losing her to the deadly claws of time after losing my dear ones for, she’s indeed been the ‘dearest’ to me in no uncertain terms. ak.bhardwaj3103@gmail.com
The writer is a Mukerian-based retired headmaster