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| Artists from Bengal play dholaks at Vaishali Nagar Pujo pandal in Jaipur |
Looking at the crimson pujo
pandal (tent) lit up by hundreds of neon lights and the devotees’ banter, I
wondered for a fleeting moment what ma
(mother) would have felt on seeing Goddess Durga come alive in her ritualistic
avatar invoked annually by Bengalis around this time of the year. She is no longer
with us. Her passing away last year brought more guilt in our hearts than swamping
us with a confounding desolation. One can bear the pain, but the guilt-trip is
altogether a wretched experience: Hard to shed, easy to come by.
Until today, I have had consciously avoided writing about
her and have held back chronic urges to surf through her photographs to jog the
loving memories that she had so benignly gifted me. The reason is simple. I couldn’t
face her in her death. An iota of happiness that comes wandering my way these
days seems laced with her sufferings that I couldn’t alleviate or found beyond
my abilities to correct to a reasonable degree of self-contentment. I am, alas,
forever incomplete in a way which tallest of achievements in post-script cannot
measure up to the smallest of care that she could have been pampered with in
her tireless, thankless life.
As a teen, I would fancy gifting her a room with a view in a
swanky house with sprawling lawns to soothe her arthritic legs and feet. If my
mother was heir to anything from my reluctant grandma, it was chronic arthritis.
My mom would have to climb a flight of stairs in our rented house on first floor with a
rickety leg in winters that would bend in an angle so deformed that she would
have to drag herself like a living corpse. “A house on the ground floor,” I would
always mumble to myself whenever I would find her walking that curse.
When I had first landed a job I would wish she would live to
see the time when there would be, if not many, cars lined up with chauffeurs to
drive her around. Till her dying day, she would adamantly refuse to take a cab and
walk on foot a distance she would consider worthy of saving herself a few rupees
and rid herself of the insecurities pounding in her head, even for a day. I would
travel by the cabs, drive my car to editorial assignments, briefly reminding
myself of the money that I had handed over to her for hiring an auto would
instead go to mending some chapped corner of the home that we had no time to
take care of.
But the one guilt that I have been nursing within has
nothing to do with lofty ideals or grand dreams that choked on the deadline. It
is but a subtle admonition that forbade my ma from expressing her love for her
granddaughter while on our way back home that kills me from within. In her
final days, she had this growing fondness for the three-year old. She would cook lunch that the kid loved, play football
with her and even read out stories to her. In fact, she was the one who introduced
her to poems way before she had started school.
A few weeks before her passing away, she started
accompanying me to drop and fetch the kid from school, a feat which she rarely
undertook before owing to her engagements at home and her rickety legs and
swollen fingers. One afternoon, she sneaked out and got some candies for the
kid. I was until her death against the kid having toffees. So, my wife and my
mom would slip in some without my knowledge to the kid. On our return trip that
day, she tried feeding one of the candies to my daughter when I just stared
into her eyes with an admonishing look in the rear-view mirror, which she
caught just in time. She withdrew into a shell. Two days later, she was no
more.
At the Pujo Pandal, I desperately wished she were standing
by my side so I would hug her without warning, which I did sometimes when I would
just fall in love with the woman who was so simple that she would kill herself
to better other lives. She loved Pujos and would pester me and goad me to
take some time out for her and take her to one. This was the first and one of
the best Pujos I attended after her death. I looked around to hug her. There
was no one. Somewhere, at some point of time she had withdrawn from my life. The
candy, it seems, has forever soured for me. I wish I hadn’t seen in the mirror that
day. Maybe my last memory of her would have at least been sadder, if not sweeter.
