I have observed that it is easy for a man to write as a man. But after I read ‘Thousand Splendid Suns’ by ‘Khalid Hosseini’, it became evident that master story tellers can picture any emotions, as in this particular case, a man has pictured a woman suffering in Afghanistan. Now I am no master story teller. But here, I have - just tried what I wanted to do for a long long time…
I still remember the day he was born. Pink and soft as a rose, I had held him in my hand and looked at his closed eyes. He had his father’s face but I was sure he would have my eyes. I just wished he would open them and cry ‘ma’. I couldn’t look away from him. I wasn’t a weak woman then but then I was a woman after all. So yes, I cried. I cried because I had a reason to live now – my son was my reason.
His father had been in army. One day a call came from his camp and he never returned. I still have the Shaurya Chakra in my room which I had to sell later. It’s a pity he never knew his son and I am often left wondering if things would be different had he lived.
Oh yes! I remember every little detail of his growing up. The first time he had held my finger and the time he had hiccupped continuously looking utterly confused. I remember him sleeping soundly in my arms, peace in his closed eyes, holding me close – afraid that the monkey might come. And I also remember the day he said it – ‘ma’. I never knew that a single syllable, that one word had the power to make me a complete woman.
Working in a government hospital with patients oozing out blood in the corridor, skin diseases moving about me and people crying over the dead, I felt good. My son was going to the best school in town. I had seen how sitting in the school rickshaw, he had looked up at me, raised his right hand and cried – “Ma! No!”. I smiled even as a patient vomited in front of me.
My son looked good with the sword, I had decided when I saw him brandishing it in the school drama. He was made the Prince – my son, my little prince. Handsome, in his black coat and courageous, calling out the enemy, I saw in him an image of his father. I stood up smiling, went home and sold the Shaurya Chakra.
He missed his father and I knew it. I saw it in his eyes when he saw fathers playing cricket with their sons or when they took them for late night strolls. He often asked about his father and I told him what a brave man he was and how God had decided to make him a star.
Later when he grew up, he had asked me how I chose to remember my husband – through the useless bravery he showed for a country that doesn’t care or by gazing at the stars. If you are a mother, let me give you a little advice – never lie to your children. Tell them how exactly how his father had died of bullets piercing through his eyes and with a face you wouldn’t recognize and yes! for a country that didn’t care.
I never approved of his friends because they were all rich. I have always felt that these rich have a way about themselves which is so magnetic that we middle class always desire to achieve it. And it is this desire that becomes our bane. My son had to learn it the hard way.
I saw him being awarded the best student in school and I clapped the hardest. Already, he had started showing signs of extraordinary talent. Always first in class, excellent in sports, a wonderful orator, I coudn’t have been more proud. I loved it when he came back from school, head boy’s badge neatly pinned to his shirt and how he would come from play ground in sweat and drink milk in one go. Little did I know then that this would be the last day he drank milk except for just one more occasion.
He was no longer the crying kid in a school rickshaw. It had been replaced by a motorbike and his waving hands, leaving for college, smile on his face. The change in him was so gradual and slow that I didn’t even notice it at once. He no longer needed to be told stories of how monkey would come if he didn’t go to sleep.
Now you have to understand here that I tried to be as understanding of adolescence as possible. He had started coming late. Late night parties with friends, I thought. He stopped eating at home. Kids like junk food now a days, I decided. He spent more time in his room than in the kitchen with me. College kids need privacy, I assumed.
After coming back from hospital one day, I couldn’t find my nose ring (Even after my husband’s death, I hadn’t given up that one piece of jewellery). I asked him too. He said he didn’t know. After an advice to mothers, I should give an advice to children too, I suppose. Children should never lie to their mothers because, “Children! Your foolish mothers can read your eyes”. And then I did something that changed my life all together.
I went into his room. I found CD’s of rock bands (men with stupid wild hair mourning at their guitar), posters of actresses I hadn’t seen before, magazines full of naked women (I am an understanding mother), a variety of deodorants and besides them - a large bible. Inside the bible, I found a neatly cut rectangle of pages in which rested a packet with white powder inside. I need not be told what it was.
The change was evident now. He came to the kitchen that night and stood there like a silent night figure saying nothing for a while and then his hands started shaking.
“Where is the packet, Ma?”, he had asked.
Trying to sleep that night, I gathered his childhood and analyzed where I had gone wrong with him. I had felt the urge to slap him that day, to throw him out of the house and to even beg him to tell just where had I gone wrong with him. But when questions fail to be answered, silence pursues. He had crept silently back to his room. I stood, went towards his room and locked his door. I could hear the sudden scrambling, his feet moving towards the door and him, standing on the other side, trying the handle. We both stood there – a firm mother (I was a strong woman you see!) and a druggist son (I wish I had better words).
We seldom spoke after that because he was never allowed out of the house. Silent, he would come to the kitchen, eat and leave to his bedroom. I remember wondering if he had some more stash tucked away somewhere I didn’t check. But even those little remains had to end someday.
“Please don’t do this Ma!”
“Give me some money Ma!”
“Where did you hide that packet bitch?”
I heard it all. One afternoon, he came up to me sobbing, begging me for drugs. He crawled at my feet like a pet. He pleaded me to kill him or he would himself do it. My feet tasted the saliva dripping from his mouth. He held my hands and cried like a child. O God! Where had I gone wrong. I had passed him the drugs.
I took him to the rehab in the valley. It was a serene and a beautiful place but once I went inside the facility, I could hear the screams of boys wasting away their youth. We saw people on the verge of tears muttering among themselves, nurses feeding people with pink and yellow tablets and people trying to hold their hands still, while fighting away the mental urge.
“This is what you want to make me Ma?”
“Will you remember me the way you miss Papa? Or do you even remember him you selfless bitch?”
“How would you love me when you couldn’t love the man who is half me? You even sold his medal. How do you remember him Ma? Tell me.”
“I remembered him through you Beta. Tell me, should I anymore?”
I spent the days wondering what my son, my piece of moon was doing at that particular hour. Sometimes I dreamed of people in white dragging him through the empty white corridors, setting him down on a white bed, he trying to fight away from his captors, all the while shouting “Help me Ma!” and then the people in white placing steel rods at his temples and then everything became white.
Once upon a time there was a father who felt that his love for the country was much greater than his responsibilities as a husband. He died a victorious war leaving a wife and a child who waited his ghost forever. There was also a mother who never let her child feel the emptiness her husband had created in their lives and fighting age and society alike, she saw her son being dragged away from the shelter of her bosom to the world of people in white.
He ran away from rehab. Somewhere inside I was relieved because he had run away from agony we both had forced upon each other. The selfish heart of the mother wanted him to come back to her. And he did come back. A month had passed since I hadn’t heard from him and then all of a sudden he turned up at the hospital one day. He had long hairs but they had become lank. His eyes had sunken in their sockets and my son had suddenly aged 10 years.
“Ma! You are a nurse. You can get it for me Mummy. Please, Please, just once.”
“Come home beta!”
“If you don’t give it to me, I will never show my face to you again. I will never have it again mummy. Just this once.”
He hadn’t aged, I thought. He had actually become a child. I put a hand above him, this time pleading, “Leave all this beta! Let’s go home”. I took him by the arm. He jerked it away and left leaving his hand on my face. My son had slapped me.
That day I went to the old jeweller’s market. The narrow streets hadn’t changed much. The shop was in pieces now but still the same manager sat behind it who I had met many many years ago. I asked him for an article I had sold him long back. He told me how he, being a true Indian couldn’t melt the precious artefact. He went down a cellar and brought back the shining piece of metal. I went home and put the Shaurya Chakra back on my bedroom wall where it still hangs, mocking me, telling me how I have been a failure as a mother.
He had disappeared from my life again. I was getting old now and lived alone in the house where the ghost of his dead father with a medal stuck to his uniform often visited me telling me the horrific tales of the war and then asking where his son was. In the nights, people in white with green masks on their face came in search of my son who I had hidden behind the curtains. I was visited by my dead patients vomiting on the floor who disapproved of my ways as a mother.
Six months later he came back again, this time at the house of the dead and the old woman. I prepared milk for him. He looked at it for a while as if trying to see his reflection in it, laughed a little and drank it one go.
“Thanks ma!”, he said. He looked better, I observed.
“Come back beta! Your mummy needs you.”
“It’s too late mummy. But I am trying to be a better person, I promise. Let me get things back on track and I will come back to you.” And then he stopped as if thinking something, “There is a girl ma! She is a very nice girl and we both love each other. She is the one who will bring me back.”
He stood up to go and looked at me. There was something he wanted to say but decided against it and left his mother once again. I never came to know what he wanted to say.
Today, a girl came looking for me. She was trying hard not to cry and it was evident she hadn’t slept. But behind the dark circles, I could see a very pretty face.
“She is the one who will bring me back”. The words kept ringing in my ears as the people (in white) brought my son’s body home. They kept him in the room below the shaurya chakra which watched him silently. They were talking something about rash driving, then police, then drugs but I couldn’t hear any of them.
Today I saw a girl crying in the corner because she loved my son. I looked around the house and saw him as a little child calling me ‘ma’, running into my arms laughing, sleeping near me, peace in his eyes. I also saw a son, my prince, my piece of moon, with his eyes closed peacefully, only this time he was as dead as I could be. I went upto him, wished he would open his eyes, and so I stroked his hairs and whispered, “So ja mere laal! (Sleep Son!) The monkey wouldn’t come now.”
I had to cry this time...
