|
|
|
July 7, 2005
When soft voices die
Maryam Murtaza Sadriwala
The most vivid memory is of her dressed in a Japanese print dressing gown putting damp strips of cloth on my feverish forehead while crooning a soft lullaby. I can still visualize the lines of worry etched on her face in spite of the fact that I was just seven, then, and drugged with antibiotics.Then come the painfully fresh memories of snuggling next to her in the dead of the night; awakened by nightmares and escaping my bed to seek refuge in her arms.
Her scent, a familiar concoction of ‘her’ and her lingering perfume still overpower my senses. And if I concentrate hard enough I can pretend that I can kiss the soft skin of her hand.
As the sands of time trickled and I became a sullen teenager I felt a change in our relationship. She wasn’t just a mother anymore, she was turning into a confidant — a friend I could share my mood swings with and discuss my embarrassments. But before I could fully understand or acknowledge the beauty of that stage, I lost her to cancer.
It’s such an incomplete, insipid word to convey the myriad of emotions we go through. Anyone who’s lost a loved one to cancer knows it’s not merely someone’s death you have to face, but a slow, painful loss, a diurnal draining, a realization that person is slipping away by the minute and there’s nothing you can do.
My family felt lost; with a searing emptiness left within us. My father struggled gracefully to act as both mother and father for me and my sister. He put in all his strength to cover up the deep loneliness he felt.
Years passed, I graduated from college and then university. Life dealt me with it’s generous shares of triumphs and blows. And then I met the man meant to be my better half. Courting and then marriage inevitably followed.
Call it coincidence, fate, irony but as destiny would have it, I live now with my new family in the very same neighbourhood, near the very house where my own mother had spent her childhood nearly four decades ago.
It’s a rambling ancient-looking mansion. A family lives there now, an unknown family. Strangers. Teaching in the neighbourhood school takes me by that mansion several times; four times a day to be specific.
And every time I can’t help but steal a look at its peeling façade. The stone walls, the looming windows, the rickety old gate — all seem to beckon me. The ghosts of yester-years seem to peer through the fading curtains.
Inevitably, as I walk past, with the wind blowing in my face or the sun beating down mercilessly on my back, I catch myself fantasizing, travelling in time, wondering how life must have been for my mother at that impressionable age.
I can nearly hear the banter of the colossal joint family, my grandfather and his three brothers with their generous entourage of children. Cousins and siblings romping around, pummelling each other, and then conveniently forgetting about what had caused the ruckus in the first place. Aunts gossiping amidst the savoury scents wafting from the enormous earthenware kitchen, and taking in the bawling of toddlers in their stride.
Noisy family gatherings over the years and long nocturnal chats with my maternal aunt have helped me cobble together scenes from my mother’s childhood. Poring over yellowed black and white photographs I’ve seeked her amidst a huge family.
A tall, slim figure, always with a hint of a smile, in fitted kurtis and voluminous shalwars. “So much like what you look now,” I often hear so from friends and acquaintances. Yes, no longer do I have to sift through rotting, long-buried, forgotten photo albums. Just a glance in a mirror tells me what my mother must have looked like 30 years down.
There was a time when I missed my mother with a pain which was profoundly physical. Time healed that invisible, gaping wound, but not completely. Every now and then, may be when I’m passing her childhood home or scrutinizing my reflection or viewing a mother-daughter moment between complete strangers, the memory flits across the mind and soul.
And the wound revives itself. Time may boast of healing it, but the past always finds a way to fit in a glove perfectly with the present. Reminding you. Always.
P. B. Shelley said it best:
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the senses they quicken.
Rose leaves when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on
|
|
|
|
