So Long Farewell

It was her mother’s funeral. The woman residing within her had cast a demonic, necromantic spell upon her. Like Mephistopheles having lost his soul, she, the daughter, sat frozen and immobile bereft of any sense of loss or grief – one insurmountable, the other inconsolable.

To recompense, the heavens decreed the gates opened that ominous day after a particularly prickly, humid and scorching summer. There was a deluge that seemed to overwhelm the storm within.

Her father, once a tall and handsome air force man her mother had married, now decrepit and dissipated sat receiving extended hands, unspoken words and half uttered condolences. His moribund visage portended yet another impending catastrophe. Cousins and friends functioned with the exactitude of well-lubricated and pre-programmed automatons. Assorted aunts and well-meaning relatives shed copious tears on her behalf.

The picture encased in the silver frame upon the mantelpiece with three generations captured for posterity reflected the benign faces of two mothers gazing, like mothers do, at their respective child. Her cousin, its photographer, had wittingly scrawled across its surface: ‘The universal face of motherhood’. No longer would any reprimand of her daughter be met with severe remonstration and umbrage – an instance of each mother taking her own child to task.

Sitting as she was in that yogic, unmoving position her eyes caught the dim luminance cast by the fountain-lamp around the corner; someone had remembered to switch it on more in reverence of her mother than to complement the downcast weather outside. Such dark but pleasant, cold evenings would find her mother reclined on the divan with Amjad Ali Khan’s sarod making soulful music in the background.

Raga after mellifluous raga would flow and time stand still as if on a long hiatus. Slender creepers hung from neatly hidden crevices of the lamp earned the epithet - ‘the hanging gardens of mother-lawn’ - fondly imposed by the family. Those verdant climbers now lay suspended, solemn and ersatz having lost their manifest sheen.

With a tree trunk for its base it had a stream carved out spirally on its surface. Water passed through this wooden valley as if it were rolling over glass marbles making a rhythmic sound – the sound of life, her mother would say. The musical cadence of that waterfall now moaned a dirge.

Outside the French windows, her mother’s other babies, the dahlias with the magnolias and the zinnias with the marigolds, a riot of colors otherwise, held a somber commiseration.

The melancholic rendition of the artist reverberated somewhere in the inner recesses of her mind. The poet’s words seemed to reach her from a far off world, yet their sound was clear, meaning poignant and the feeling emotive…

Na leke jao…na leke jao…
Mere dost ka janaza hai…
Abhi tau garm hai mithi…
Jism tazaa hai…
Na leke jao…na leke jao…
Mere…dost...ka…janaza…hai̷ 0;

Her dost, her companion, her guardian angel, her soul mate, her life giver and nurturer had succumbed to life yet again. She had been done to death many a time by life before. She, the daughter had been a partner in crime too. She had hauled and mauled her, bruised and maimed, pilloried, crucified and guillotined, slain, murdered and killed her until this day when death – dark, black and sinister – had come beckoning. She had finally and meekly submitted to its menacing forces of annihilation. Never had the angel of death encountered such a willing soul, so fervent in surrender. Her earnestness made him feel most culpable. He cast a glance heaven wards. The Master stood firm in his resolve to execute the good deed of the day.

Gawd! The same face! Couldn’t you have inherited your father’s?
He, ‘the answer to our prayers’, in her mother’s words spewed this venom with his tongue, the very same succulent, most luscious piece of flesh, which had once traced the contours of her body, teased her nerves, tranquilized her senses, devoured and savored her very being experiencing unsung rhapsodies, breaking into orgasmic raptures, taking it to the zenith of frenzied ecstasy. It now ripped through her heart and tore into her soul. Both lay crucified. With that single verbal explosion, he hurled her into a bottomless abyss, the nadir of humiliation and rejection. She, a woman denied, never could crawl up to salvage the remnants of her beaten self-respect. She lay abandoned and discarded - a castaway.

Fa bi ayyi aalaai rabbikuma tukazzibaan………
Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny?

And she had denied her mother…the most blessed of all blessings…God’s incarnate on earth. What did those mother’s day cards say? God couldn’t be on earth; so He created the mother. Mother…. her mother…the victim of her aversion lay still amidst the chanting of the verses, the burning of incense, the whispers of suspicion, the clouds of confusion, the silence of the wails…. Amidst it all she lay still.

That forehead would never again crease into a worry; that eyebrow would never arch into mock relief; those eyes would never laugh or cry - with her or for her; those cheeks would never glow with pride and happiness; the lips would never overwhelm her with kisses; the arms would never embrace her insecurities; the hands would never pat her achievements or assuage her fears; the fingers would never caress her wayward stresses or flick a tear away; those legs would never pace in anticipation; that body would never offer her warmth and refuge…

But the heart - the heart of her mother, the quintessence of unconditional, selfless, everlasting love - would continue to beat long after she lay dead. Its blood would flow, gush and surge, sometimes in a pool, at others drop-by-drop, minute after minute, second upon second, moment past moment…till eternity…for her.

And her own heart began to bleed and as it did her mind became numb but the daughter in her stirred regaining her senses from a deep, forcibly induced state of unconsciousness.

The shoulders remained fraught with the heaviness of an unseen juggernaut…the woman still unyielding, holding her grip tight.

The daughter crouched slowly in helplessness…her hands fell in a lifeless fall and touched upon her mother’s cold feet…feet beneath which lay her true haven, her promised yet elusive heaven…

Her eyes brimmed over with guilt and remorse. The tears came silently at first. Then her shoulders began to quiver till the convulsions consumed her entire body.

The outside deluge had found its way in…

The woman was befuddled. While her hands continued to seize the daughter something somewhere gave in…. The clasp of her fingers slowly came undone and they unfurled. It was time to let go.

The daughter looked askance for a fleeting moment…

Then an inaudible scream escaped her lips………….

Ammi!!!

She wept and cried and wailed and moaned...and finally bid her mother farewell.