The Brown File

Miles away from the cozy town I had made a place I called home, I became just a mere brown file.

I don’t know whether it was a blessing or curse but having travelled a day’s worth of journey to get the pain in my abdomen cured I was diagnosed with a disease that never got introduced to me but had to lure me to this place so far away from home. Added on top of it was the fear of my maiden flight experience.

My daughter reminded me how blessed I was that I was sitting in the plane with no expenses of my own. I wouldn’t call it a blessing; not with images of planes colliding into tall buildings; planes colliding with each other and planes getting lost in the middle of nowhere dancing in my mind. I secretly wished television had never been introduced in our part of world. If only I had not seen these gruesome images in television I would not have been able to conjure up these images.

Fresh fear of being in the clouds, so close to God’s heaven quickened the already altered heartbeat in my chest. Had it not been those flickering television images behind my closed eyes, I would have seen god (that would surely have quickened my recovery!). But instead I was fated to become a brown file.

Holding appointment slips; fees and charges in the handbag; my daughter began the ordeal of standing in queues, a never ending one for that.

Seated under the whirling fan, yet sweating profusely, I would look at my daughter standing in the queue shifting her limbs from one to another. Had it been normal times I would have rebuked her for putting on weight like a sumo wrestler but seeing the dedication with which she looked at my comfort over her ordeals, I watched her with renewed love.

Many days of tests, money paid and sweaty queues later; there it was THE BROWN FILE. I had become a brown file. There were tests and consultation with doctors that needed my presence but even there too that brown file would be there, majestically taking a place more important than my ailing body. I thought highly of the brown file when my daughter left me in the cool AC room of the lodge to get more appointments for doctors, tests and other things that awaited my twisted fate. I knew the brown file was taking my place in that long arduous queues, jostling with population that surpasses more than the total population of my whole country put together.

I marveled at the fact that we didn’t have to get in the queue for getting the reports of all those tests. Whichever building, whichever doctor we were referred to, the brown file appeared miraculously. I didn’t have to tell them anything about my ailment. The doctors and the nurses became like a soothsayer, knowing all about my ailments without any of us having to explain. I would have seriously considered the soothsayer title for these people in this hospital if only I had not seen my daughter chat with her friends worldwide; groped in front of her laptop. Technology! I was aware of it.

I wished to trade places with the brown file whenever I was taken in the big room where none of my kith and kin were allowed save me and the brown file. While the surgeons casted calm glances at the brown file, I was cut up like some goat in a slaughter house. And not to forget, I need to add the act of stitching my cuts like I was some tattered rags in some dark tailor’s corner. Tears stinging my eyes I eyed the brown file resting calmly in front of the computer.

My daughter never gave me the responsibility of peering into the contents of that file. She knows I cannot differentiate an A from B but there was something malignant in that file that carried my name but never blessed my ears. Whenever I asked her, she would smile and tell me about some of the naughty antics she did behind my back as a little kid. I would laugh with her but secretly I could see the pain she tried her best to hide from me.

That brown file has passed many hands; has seen me being cut up and stitched; has seen me sob in pain; has seen me smile with hopes of feeling better soon;has seen me weep silently in despair. Has my soul got in that brown file or have I actually become that brown file, I am yet to learn!


(First posted in WAB in May, 2012)

Fate

I was a little girl. Often when the moon tore through the flimsy curtain, I would follow my gaze through that single file of blue light and try to bury the squabbles from the other room where my dad and mom slept. I was too young to even link them to a cat and dog; all I thought whenever I heard their raised voices was nothing;I took it as natural as the moonlight streaming into my room. Before I could even comprehend what a family life is all about, my parents broke the walls of family as they decided to part ways.

Salty tears gushed in silent streams each night as I lay in either of my parent’s house. Snuggling in the warm blankets didn’t shed the coldness that enveloped my heart. Somewhere lurking in my ignorant heart was the knowledge of the incomplete home.

Years stomped on another and many blue lights of the moon did I tear with my steady gaze and empty arrows of grief from my heart. However, I learnt to live life in its normal course. I would take in my share of oxygen needed to stay alive and maybe I even contributed some amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Well, that’s what I remember hearing in my science classes. Two decades of struggling to fit into two different worlds, I sat back in the cold room one dark night.

It was a night like the one I had often handed myself to the slumber hours back in the days when my parents were together. The blue light of the moon wove through the stainless glass, partly lighting the corner in which I pretended to surrender myself to sleep. Maybe, although it was a different shade of blue I found it the same for the two souls who had decided to part ways long ago, now sat together in the other room.

Strange!

It’s a strange world we live in and stranger are the ways of life. Cancer had brought my dying mom and my remorse- filled dad together. On the day my mom freed her soul in the arms of the man who had denounced her long ago I fell into a troubled sleep. I tossed and turned like a kite let loose in the strongest of the wind.

“Why did he leave her then? Why was he back in that odd hour?” Many questions flooded the rivulet in my heart. Met I a soothsayer in my dream. “Let me explain,” he said in a voice so calm and regal that I was compelled to listen to him spellbound.

“In their previous life, your mom was a cat,” he paused. I found my eyes grow wide in recognition of knowledge. My mom never left the area around the hearth, hmmm…. So she was a cat after all. “and your dad was a flea living on her body.” No wonder my dad was all jumpy in whatever he did in life. “Your mom, the cat then lost him when she was scratching herself. He was passed onto a passing dog who passed him onto another dog and to another.” “And to another?” I added, not with a questioning tone but a bass voice that put a big fullstop to the number of felines my father, the poor flea was passed onto. That explained why he never stuck to one woman in his life.

As it was in his previous life, he was tossed from the arms of one woman to another. “Then why did he return to my mom in her last days?” The question slipped from my tongue before I could even arrange it as a thought in my brain. “Well, I’ve the explanation,” he said. “As your father, the flea was travelling on the back of a dog, he happened to pass by the body of your mom, the cat who had been crushed by the wheels of a heavy truck on that road. He had got caught in her fur in that last final breath of her body.

Fate!

I opened my eyes and went to check on my dad who was a silent visitor in my house. He slept with a peaceful look on his face as if he had found the place where he belonged.

I knew my journey to the crematorium had once again been planned.

(An old post I had posted long ago in WAB )

River of Poetry

River of poetry flows
Ceaselessly, uninterrupted
From your pen
And I sift through each word
Some rounded with metaphors strong
Some flattened with similes
And yet some more polished with puns
I continue sifting through each
Sometimes I splutter on some sentiments
Sometimes I drown in the rhythm
And sometimes, I float on serious thoughts
The river of poetry flows
Ceaselessly, uninterrupted
From your pen
And I wonder, how many whirlpool of emotions lies in your heart
To keep that river flowing ~