One AMONG MANY

One night her wilted old frame that encased her limp heart lay on the bed. On the following day the stale sun in the blue sky rose right on time.

Four months back her husband, children and grandchildren celebrated her seventy-eighth birthday with friends and other relatives. Three months later she lost her husband, and then she added one more month to her date of birth before dying of a broken heart. Before her husband started to perish due to a brain-rotting disease, they both felt perfectly fortunate. They embraced the malady gifted to them by their age, while a medical file holding reports and prescriptions fought for their life.

Their togetherness enticed them to hit a century, even when he failed to recognise his significant other for days, and then finally exited his mortal self on approaching his expiry date at ninety.

Since that date, she became conscious of the fireball that travelled across the sky above her from dawn to dusk. Unlike her, its energy never faded. She frequently squinted her eyes to notice how it withdrew itself behind the cloak of the cloudlets. At times its glare blinded her, and its rage made her swelter. She observed it from the window of her bedroom, which overlooked a busy road flowing by. The frame always exhibited the external world to her. An array of robust chassis that revved their engines through the motorway, and jaunty pedestrians in their colourful clothing walking by to catch up with the day kept her eyes active. It still did, but the direction of her gaze moved from the banal to the blue and beyond.

Once every year this window threw a glimpse of an airplane that winged her children from abroad into her nest. She lost both her children to the foreign swank a long ago. They flew and landed on her lap once every year. Their homecoming made her feel full, and she never complained their absence though she wanted them by her side at every tick.

The death of their father made them fly a second time that year, and they stayed a bit longer this time. But it wasn’t a happy gathering. For hours their mother sat next to the bookshelf near to the window but touched no books. “Try watching the television, or reading books as you do. It will help you through this,” her son urged. The television she once remained glued to each evening made her queasy. The couple loved reading books, and newspapers and watching television series together. A cup of milk tea replenished their tired minds two times a day. “How about reciting a poem by Rabindranath Tagore this afternoon?” she insisted. “Can we finish the novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay? You read it for us yesterday, today let me take it from where you left off. You sit back and enjoy listening,” he smiled sipping his tea and scanned the floor. “Did you drop something?” his gaze worried her, but he didn’t come back to her. Then slowly as the days passed the pests vacated all his senses. His grey matter erased the identity of his loving spouse leaving her muddled amidst the countless memories they once dwelt in.

A sudden thud stirred her back to the present. “Thaami (grandmother) tell us a story,” the three grandchildren came rushing to her while bouncing the football on the floor. “When your grandfather and I visited the splendid Taj Mahal, an old man approached us……” She was hastily stopped by her six-year-old granddaughter.

“Like dadai?” she pointed at her grandfather’s portrait on the altar. “How old were you then?”

“Back then we were as young as your parents, and your father was just like you. The old man told us a story of this king who…….” Her voice tapered.

“Come on, hurry up, we are running late for the airport,” her eldest son entered the room and stooped down to touch her feet for one last of the finite times for an infinite blessing.

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