Of old things and new meanings


 A cure resides in the offender!


On an untypical day, you find the mother popping pills from the saccharine loaded shrikhand dabba. You peep and probe and your investigating eye is awarded. The mother is using the dabba to store her diabetic medicines. The biggest irony of her life. What joy the dabba must be deriving from storing the comfort it carries in its afterlife! In its overtly sugary living it lures the devastated bodies into a fatal temptation. Yet, in its journey towards reincarnation, the mother gives it an opportunity to escalate her cure which was deterred by consumption of creamy  delicacy.


Mothers know it right. They set the karmic wheel in motion. The dabba benefits from their generosity and wide vision. Our mother gives a an afterlife to every animate and inanimates of the house. Like the dabba, the Bhaiyya's worn out t-shirt is hanging on the younger Babli's shoulders. Oversized, yet she has to adorn the shabby fabric. Then when she overgrows it, like a war veteran the t-shirt is refurbished to suit the dusting cloth on kitchen counters. It's corners are laced and holes are patched with floral fabrics. The 'buddi godi lal lagam' now wipes kitchen platforms and greasy surfaces clean. When the floral patches groan and fade away leaving gaping holes, then the t-shirts journey to nirvana begins but not before scrubbing dusty feet and murky shoes. 


Finally, from being the doormat, the t-shirt which was brought for Bhaiyya's fifteenth birthday leaves the house on his twentieth. Fives years of service is a whole lifetime for it. The mother very grateful and mindful of its service, just doesn't discard it. With weepy eyes and a heavy heart, she thrusts it in the hands of the maid. "May this serve you like it did to me." Her departing words are the best farewell the t-shirt can ever receive. For a week, she misses its soothing touch. A touch she misses from her children. For years, it smelled of young Bhaiyya and then little Babli. Her children now grown smell of secret smoke and volatile vapors. Yet, like them she had to realize the t-shirt too.


From all this, now she holds her diabetes dear. In her offender, she seals her cure. Her habit is harrowing, horribly harrowing. Yet, she refuses to part ways with it.


A mother after all she is.

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