Rootless

When I was a kid, Mumma used to say 'jaar maa naae, taar gaa naae.' This Bangla idiom translates to 'one who doesn't have a mother, doesn't have a village'. Village, I believe isn't a reference to a village per se but home or a place one belongs to. The day my world shook with the news of my Mom's passing away, these words came to me out of nowhere. She hadn't used them for the longest time but on that night, when I was thousands of miles away from her, they just kept reverberating in my ears as I tried to hold myself together in the face of the biggest loss of my life.

From the time the news reached me through my father's broken voice over a phone call till the time I reached home, I had 14 hours to bide. The sense of being rootless had started seeping in those hours as sanity was being lost with every flowing tear. I had been cribbing the entire last year as how I'm 25 and yet I have never lived away from home for a long period. The constraints that came with the duties of a son had taken a toll on my development as a person, I felt. And then this happened. As I was enjoying the adulation of a job away from home The root left the little tree. I had received my freedom in the way I never wanted.

As I started my journey back home, the feeling of rootless started taking the size of a mountain whose weight began to crush me. Who was I going back to? Since I was a kid, my ring of the doorbell was always responded to by Mom. If she didn't respond, she would be the first thing my eyes would seek. Her questions about the day, be it at school or college or office, made my coming back home complete.

Climbing up the stairs of my house with steps that seemed tied to boulders, I broke down. All the pieces of me that I had held together with great strength in the last 14 hours fell apart at once. The door of my house was open already. I wish it wasn't. I wish I had knocked and she had opened with that gentle and innocent smile of hers. I wish she had hugged me and said came back from school? But now, what's left is a long list of wishes of a rootless man. And no wish is stronger than the wish of spending her last days by her side. Of being able to take care of her which I promised to do after coming back.

But she's gone now. And so is my chance. All that's left behind is the feeling of being rootless which grows every second that I spend in the house where she saw her best and worst times in the last twenty-two years. Because she's everywhere in that house as well as in my actions. 

Even then, it's a new house that I seem to be living in these days. I lived here for so long without knowing much about it. Because I didn't need to. Mumma knew. She knew everything. We were always astonished at how she would just make anything available that was asked of her. So many times, when my little nephew would ask me for a pencil or eraser or colors from me in the hope that I'm the closest to him in terms of age so I might have what he wants, she saved me from embarrassment. Or probably embarrassed me by presenting to him in no time what I failed to.

The other day, the search for a nail cutter led me to this little niche in the kitchen wall which I forever knew existed but hadn't cared to look into. As my hands searched for the nail cutter, they came across a bunch of my old pencils and erasers. She kept them all with all the care in the world that only mothers are capable of. And with all that love and care turned these walls into what we could call home. In her absence, very little of that home seems alive. There is no sound of the clanking of her bangles. Evenings no more begin with her playing the Conch shell. There is no aroma of food cooked by her. The kitchen seems to be sobbing quietly. The utensils there seem to be struggling to come to terms with the indefinite leave they have been sent to.

There's no aspect of your life that doesn't have an imprint of your parent on it, especially your mother's. There's something she had to say about everything I did, be it about the way I ate, the way I sat, the way I forgot to take the towel for bath and called out to her from the bathroom. As innocuous as they seemed then, now I realize all those words were like nutrients from the root to the plant that were helping it to grow. As I twist and turn on my bed at night and replay all those words in her voice in my head these days, I wonder how will the plant grow now? No one, absolutely no one, cares for you as much as your mother does. And so many of us, including me, are guilty of taking all of that love and care for granted. The realization of the enormity of love and care in her every small action hits me like a thunderbolt every now and then when my mind drifts to those days when she was here. And leaves me with a question that will never get answered - Could I give her back even half of it in her lifetime?

As kids, since we see our parents from the beginning of our existence, we make the mistake of assuming they're going to be there forever. We make life plans without taking into account that one day their time here would be over and that at once will force us to change all our plans. As I look back now, I find it so strange that the most hectic time of my life professionally coincided with the last ten months of her life. I promised her that I would spend time with her after the project I was working on. Sadly, before the project could end, she left us. There is time now but not her.

Mom's passing on has compelled me to look at life from a new lens. It's akin to being born again, although with a heavy bag of regrets and learnings. But even in this new life, she has left behind her blessing in the form of a very strong man who is my father and three beautiful sisters who have been a parent to me since I was born.

But home, and coming back to it, will never be the same again until I meet my root again at the end of this journey. Maybe.