I Love You

This is a story that i will live to tell my children and my children's children if my children haven't already done it.

Yesterday was a terribly eventful Sunday. Netra had received an invitation to 'We the People', and asked me to go with her, so i did. We were a whole bunch of us from college, and i loved every second of it - the ridiculously beautiful Bombay University Convocation Hall which was the venue, the behind-the-scenes buzz of a media team trying its best to get a show right, the very diverse and still intelligent views of all who spoke, the more intelligent private conversations that we privately had as we reacted to what was being said, the glare of camera lights, the sharply fluctuating heartrate whenever i heard someone on the panel say something absolutely outrageous, the very very low threshold of Teesta Setalvad to metamorphosise into a raving shrew, the delightfully lucid comments of Bachi Karkaria. I saw how a person's rigidity of ideas can so utterly defeat her cause. I saw things are never as simplistic as they seem - and that even people in so-called power live nightmare lives being constantly pulled and pressured from 15 different directions. I also saw how if, even under such trying circumstances, if you stop being honest with yourself, even for a while, you'll be left with nothing. I saw just how orchestrated even a free-voice show can get, and i also saw why this is really necessary. And i found that i feel more about things than i permit myself to feel. It was a day filled with discoveries.

Quite understandable then, that the wave carried on even after i'd left the place, and i carried on riding it even as i took the long walk to the busstop and picked a seat by the window, so i could talk to the wind about the thousands of ideas raging in my mind. It is not often that i am stirred to such passions and see things so clearly at the same time, and i was loving it. Which is why when i got home and found mom arguing with dad and going bonkers about a non-issue and additionally being illogical about it, i gave her a piece of my mind about how ridiculous she was being. This was because she was trying to 'control' an area of my brother's life that, i believed both with head and heart, only he should be allowed to control. In hindsight, this was also me lashing out at her for not having the time, as she was in the midst of her crusade, to hear about all the million things i wanted to tell her about my day. I didn't show it, but somewhere, i resented her for it, and i didn't feel guilty about this because i felt justified. Logic and commonsense, fairness and optimism were on my side. Why should i not make that clear? I was half afraid she'd have another panic attack - exactly three sundays ago she had been pseudo-paralysed by one, easily one of the worst evenings of my life. At that time, as i sat beside her in a hospital emergency room, and for the rest of the week and a half that she was recovering at home, i thought of little else but medicine timings and oxygen masks and worst-case scenarios and what i'd do without her. And how she was half responsible for bringing this upon herself by letting herself get anxious all the time. Now it felt like she was overdoing the illogical anxiety bit...and i was angry all over again.

So when dad asked if i'd like to go to the Agiary with him i agreed, because i felt i didn't want to be with mama just then. Her recentest adversary off the battlefield, mama didn't know what to do and started watching a movie (The Pursuit of Happyness - i movie i had recommended the previous day). She said something about me please 'getting out of the way' (physically, i was really blocking her view, but of course i took it metaphorically), i made a sarcastic remark about hostility levels, and then i was out of the house with dad.

At the Agiary i sat before the Fire and prayed and looked into it and half searched for answers in this sudden surge of very intense feelings of jubilation from earlier in the day and resentment from the latter, and half wondered whether i even wanted to, because from where i saw it, hey, i'd been right. I was pouring just this out to you-know -who when i saw this lady, she must have been about 45, sitting nearby, immersed in her prayer book...and weeping. And she was weeping in that ashamed manner of weeping - a welling of the eyes, a quick wiping off, an invariable betrayal bu a couple of tears...clearly, she was somewhere else. Somebody came up to her and muttered some sort of instruction, she nodded dry-eyed, looked back into her little book, and more tears.

I couldn't pray with any concentration whatsoever after that. I sat around not knowing what to do or how to make this added sense of confusion go away. I decided to go and sit in my favourite place in the whole fire temple, the granite bench beside the well outside, on which nobody sits because too many bougainvillea creepers fall hang down its roof. i love that bench for precisely that reason, and it has come to become my foolproof 'thinking place'. So I left the carpeted area even as she did, and that was my signal. In a place within the Agiary where i found myself alone with her, praying, i had to do it. I asked her whether anything was wrong because she looked like she'd been crying. And at this point, this woman, this complete stranger, first smiled in denial, and then immediately melted into tears and said "I lost my mom. 15 days ago".

And she sobbed even as i tried to hug her and offer lame comfort. And then she nodded at all the condolences and said "It's ok now", sobbed a little more, looked straight at the floor, and walked out. I had nothing to do but now go down to the well. She was already there. As i settled on the bench, she smiled, and left. And in my thinking place, all i could think about was her.

Later in the evening as i was going out with dad to pick up some dinner, i asked him whether he knew the lady in the red t-shirt who was in the Agiary (since in my experience, dad knows ALL bawas), and dad said, sure he recognised her as so-and - so, and i told him that she lost her mom a fortnight ago. Dad didn't know this, and he asked, 'when again did u say it happened?' and i told him again. And then he said, "Yes, now i remember, when mama was in the hospital, her mom was there too."

And there was my answer. 21 days ago, this stranger was with her mother in the hospital, and i was with my mother in the same hospital. Her mother died. He worst case scenario actually happened. She has to live a mumless life. I don't. And that is my answer.