This is about a little girl who lost her father at the age of 7. She had a younger brother and their mom was just 25 when this tragic thing happened. This girl and her brother hadn’t even realized how their world was going to change from then on. The struggle started in their lives.
Mother struggling to earn and take care of the children without any support. She struggled with her emotions as she was so deeply in love with her husband whom she had lost. She couldn’t cry tears of pain so that she would not make her children feel scared or weak.
The girl started to wonder why her mother had stopped putting on any makeup and why does she now always wears dull color clothes. She often ran to her mother with a lipstick and requested her to wear it. And her mother would refuse (back then, in a hindu family, a widow was not allowed to wear bright colors or any kind of makeup).
Then came a day, her mother told her that their father was coming back. That he was gone for a while and now he is returning. The girl knew in her heart, its not her father, its going to be her step father, but looking at the shine on her mother’s face, she kept quite. She was surely happy about something – that her mother would start wearing bright colors and wear a lipstick or a nail paint again.
Life after that was full of struggle. Much more than it was earlier.
Years passed, the girl was now 34. She had her own children now. One day, sitting next to her mom breastfeeding her baby, her mother spoke to share how she felt when she lost her husband.
It was the first time ever she talked about the same.
She said,
“Your father was a very nice man, he helped me with everything. He was working at a high level in an organization, the same company gave me a job after his death on the basis of his seniority. He had 2 heart attacks and the third one took his life. He was hospitalized for about a month and i used to visit him everyday in the morning after sending you and your brother to the school. But that day, that dark day, i just entered the elevator in the hospital and saw a nurse with whom i got familiar with in that past one month. I greeted the nurse good morning and usually she would she would greet me back the same. But that day, she replied back saying “don’t you know?”
The floor under my feet froze. I wanted to jump out through the half open door of the elevator. Few other people in the elevator stopped me.
That moment, that one moment was the most uncertain moment of my life. I could not consume, what had just happened. I had you and your brother aged 7 and 5 and here I just lost my husband.”
The girl heard her mother talking her heart.
The irony of different perspectives brought tears to her eyes, that when her mother was going through the darkest moment of her life, as a child, she was busy thinking about why her mother would not wear any make up anymore!!
voices coming
mySestina 