Where heart melts into words.: A MOTHER'S WAIT: AN UNDYING BELIEF

Quotes Box

"I have known music to be her timeless reverberation in a forlorn corner of my soul; just when life was closing down upon me with its pangs of haunting silence."

"Hope is the point the 'world within' comes to an equilibrium with the 'world around'."

"The cold that my body feels can be comforted by pullovers of our choices. It is the winter that comes back each year, inevitably; is how we are connected on the face of time. A sweet suffering of forever..."

"My poverty, I know, was glamorous because trading you, my love, for a better life is outright heinous."

"Love was the day when she drank and I felt quenched."

"Life, ever since, had been one gripping tale. Your happening gave it a genre."

"Want is the soul's desire. Need, the mind's crave. Love, thus, I believe, is a bit of both."

"Art is how you lie to the world without ever feeling sinned."

"Sorrow is true and beyond the powers of healing, when you can taste the oceans on your lips."

She was old. Very old. Her elbow joints and ankle massaged with oil from crushed eucalyptus seeds, shone in the morning sun.

She reclined in the cane chair with a grunt and stretched her legs. Two thin, fair fingers of her's allowed the dense bun at the back of her head to unfold. It dropped open to its full length. Thin, white strands of hair then came to rest against the brown canes of the chair. She pushed back at the bridge of her spectacles and tried to focus. Her wrinkle rimmed eyes slowly narrowed upon the two long aluminium needles working to weave the neckline of a small, pink cardigan. Every time she pulled at the strand of the wool, the ball rolled at her feet and yet another stitch was added to the neckline. Her hands tirelessly worked with the needles, as the bangles kept clinking.

"Nice design aunty" I appreciated.

"For my daughter..." She smiled but her eyes still held narrowed at the tips of the working needles.

"But isn't it too small?" I queried sportingly. Considering her age, her daughter must be too old to fit into an infant's size.

A silence followed as my eyes traced down her old arms.

"Don't you know that all reincarnations happen from the infant stage..." she paused and looking away at a distance, mumbled, "...she will come...she will definitely come"

I followed her gaze and found a little girl, in a pink cardigan, chasing a butterfly amid hedges of white daisies.

I left the place without a word and looking up, tried to hold back the tears from leaping over the banks of eyes. The clinking of her bangles and the sound of working needles gradually fading in my ears.

Sobhan Pramanik