something that i lost

Am attending a writing workshop for last couple of weeks, and last week one of the prompts was- something that you lost. After we wrote down the loss, the next prompt was to write about the loss from five senses (see, smell, hear, taste and feel).  I always try to hide the biggest loss of my life by making it appear funny or shadowing it with other losses. But as the prompt was given, it seemed time for me to mourn.

Something that you lost

My family and my ability to trust without questioning.

I saw my mother walk out with two suitcases, her life in that house for more than thirty years boxed in two suitcases.

The house ever since smelled of rotten flowers, no other smell not even of our childhood.

For a month after my mother left, I stayed back. Every evening I will wait for my father to come back, expecting maybe he will ask “did you eat?”. Simple words but would have helped in taking down some of the anger and disbelief that it was finally happening.  The words never came and the anger turned into solid and cold hatred.

My taste, appetite for family, family bonding, to keep the family together died.

I am leaving, it's early summer, but the morning is not as unbearable as it usually is for most of the time, perhaps some mercy from whoever created us. I have wrapped up my birth, my sisters’ birth days and weddings, my mother’s life in albums, in couple of furniture. I look at my father, the way I have always, trying to find validation, love and affection, wishing to see a longing to keep the family together. I see nothing,  a blank face and a pair of eyes, perhaps a bit of bewilderment, it finally happened.

I did not exactly see what I was looking for, maybe he did not show. After all I got my stubbornness from him. And I ceased to look for how he felt, how I feel. But the longing strangely stayed.

I loved the smell of “rajanigondha”, every year on my grandfather’s death anniversary we had lots of rajanigondha. I never met him, but I always loved him. My aunt’s used to tell me I am like him, as I always tried to keep the family together. But then they changed their opinion. Since the boxes were packed, we never did anything on that day, other than silently acknowledging, Feb 29^th 1952. I don’t remember buying rajanigandha again.

I hear him speak now, about me, about my mother. How he is proud of me, how he loves us. How he wants to visit me. My anger creates an inferno which burns every emotion that am left with. His words do not count any more.

My taste for togetherness has died, the longing persists though. Can things still exist after they die?

I am just letting myself feel in small bits, I know the feelings will come back one day. The dam has to break and there would be a devastating flood. But not yet, not now.

I can see him breath, however shallow, but i see the movement of his chest cage. Or is that the heart-lung machine? After all the doctors told us he is not there. It’s just the machine, perhaps it always was just a machine, yes just a machine. That will justify all the heartlessness.  I look at my mother, her eyes are blank, is she mourning for something that never was? Or maybe it always was, I did not see it. She asks me, “am I finally a widow?” my sister flies in, reluctant. She never liked baba. But as she stood at the hospital cabin door I saw horror in her eyes. Did she see the skeleton of our childhood spread in front, entangled with tubes and wires? A last desperate effort by the family and society to bring some flesh and love perhaps?

I smell the pesticide he swallowed since then whenever I am scared.

Is poison really bitter? He loves bitter food though, me too. Is the love of bitterness in our genes?

I was just 26.