Empty Nests

He walked towards the waiting car, with his usual casual expression etched on his face. Only this time he didn’t push her away gently when she hugged and kissed him good bye. As the car moved away her eyes blurred and she walked back into the house, unabashedly letting the tears flow down her cheeks. He had squeezed out these 4 days out of his busy work schedule “to spend quality time with my parents ” as he laughingly put it ,to cover up the embarrassment. That is him. Disliking any display of emotions , she was remembering….

Two normal children growing up in a middle class family. The mother ambitious and idealistic ,giving her best to her children but expecting the best out of them .Her concerns were practical-cooking for the children, feeding them, disciplining them and above all coaxing them to be the best.She liked to believe that her children were special , although they didn’t show any signs of unusual brilliance, at least nothing that she approved of. Perhaps she wanted to live through them .She believed that Khalil Gibran didn’t know a thing about parenting when he wrote his famous lines “On Children”. Meanwhile between report cards and showdowns about poor performance, time flew by without any one noticing . When the children grew up and took roads less traveled, she stood at the cross roads thinking that may be Khalil Gibran did have a point…….

She laid down quietly on the bed looking at the mounted pictures on the wall,shimmering in memories, waiting for the next season when her fledglings will come home even if it is for 4 days……..

Where man is rendered helpless

“ Mom, R.. passed away”, my son called up to convey the sad news. It was a shocking news . I didn’t know he was ill and was in the hospital . It took some time to absorb its reality .I was thinking about R..I remembered his rich baritone voice, now suddenly silenced forever. Who would have broken the news to his widowed mother that her only son is no more. How his young wife would have taken the news ? Theirs was a love marriage. I had attended the function. It was a Tamilian wedding. R.. was a Tamil Brahmin and his bride a Bihari. She looked beautiful in the resplendent 9 yard Kanchipuram silk sari. She married R out of love knowing fully well that he is hemophiliac and HIV positive, something which he got in his childhood during a careless blood transfusion. R bore his condition and its

accompanied problems quite stoically. At least he pretended to be brave. I remember the arguments my son and R used to have as to how R is not taking enough care of himself or some such thing which normally happens between friends. R and his wife did a lot of work for HIV infected people . Things were almost normal in their life or so we all thought. But every time R fell ill his mother and wife must have gone through hell. I wonder if they were ever prepared for the eventuality . Or for that matter, is anyone of us ? At least I am not. As the great poet John Donne put it “Every man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind ….therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” Perhaps I am reminded of my own mortality and the uncertainties of this joke called life.