The sixty year old rebel

She sits there at that favorite time of the day, children off to work, grandchildren packed off to school. She sits with her tired legs stretched out in front of the TV. She has her faithful coffee tumbler next to her, empty of course.

She is channel browsing and happens upon one channel, where an old man is giving instructions on food habbits for diabetics.

"I hate it when I am told what to do. In fact, if someone tells what to do, I will never do it....just never will. I could read up something on the paper or something like that, and decide on my own. But never in my life will I be told what to do. Never!", She tells with a calmness that masks the fiereceness of her words.

I smile inside, just nodding outside. I think of her as the sixty year old rebel, of how all these years have not worn out her fiestyness, and I cannot stop smiling thinking about it even now.

Walk

She walks across, in slow steps. It's been a struggle off late, this walking business, yet she must. She keeps a hand protectively across her stomach and waddles by, soaking in the wonderful scenes. And then she stops, looking at the two coffee cups on that lonely table. She smiles, a knowing smile and continues.

Good Bye!

He sat there rolling chapatti dough into tiny balls.

In another time not so long back, she would sit near him and turn those balls into circular chapattis. He wouldn't have rolled 10 balls, and she would ask him to go rest, for his hands might hurt.

Was this a budding romance? No, they have been married for a decade.

How things change when you least expect them to? Love alone wasn’t enough to kill those misbehaving cells.

He sat there, frozen in time, unable to say Good-bye!

PS: I wrote this for the 88 word challenge at the Writer's club in office.

Dedicated to maami who loved maama a lot, and to maama for still holding on to her love. 

PPS: Not to spoil the cheer of the season. I couldn't come up with anything else for the topic - Good bye! One of the members had a joyous take on Good bye. He had written about Marriage- Good bye to bachelorhood. 

Anyways, Season's Greetings to all the visitors and readers of my blog. May you get whatever your heart desires. May your eyes see all the Joy surrounding you! Happy New Year!

Prayer

It was like time travel written about in Science fiction books. Here she was in her present, sitting calmly. And suddenly the world around her begins to spin. And suddenly it’s as if she is herself, from a few years ago. Everything’s the same and yet everything is so different.

She is young and naive. No tinge of cynicism hues her thoughts. She visits this very temple everyday at the same specific time. And she prays for the same two things fiercely. She could never leave the others, the world.They were always there in her prayers, added as if in conclusion. But the two things that seemed to matter the most, was what her lips repeatedly muttered with generous sprinkling of pleases. Please God! Please God! There was so much pleading in her inner voice that those who didn’t look into her eyes would never know. There’s no point going into what she wanted. At that stage of her life, it was what she desperately wanted. She did all she could in her might. But she couldn’t influence other people’s minds. Her faith could do that. God could do that.

It was so real that she pinches herself to bring herself to the present. Tears coat her eyes. She can’t believe that whatever she had desperately prayed for, God had given her. Yet for so many years, in so many places of worship and non-worship, this had never occurred to her. Every stage in life brings its own needs and its own prayers.

But this once, just this once, when she was all by herself, with her thoughts, and the history of the place, all she felt was contentment. There was nothing more to ask. Thanks! – Her lips muttered, as she closed her eyes in Prayer.

A Mother's job

So she tells me, rubbing her eyes gently, as if to massage even the swollen eyelids, “I haven’t been sleeping well for some days now.”

Why, I think to myself, for she seems to have everything. She’s well settled, lives comfortably with her children and grandchildren. What on earth could be driving her sleep away? Only I don’t question, I just listen.

“One day, it was the first son’s accident. A minor one, he had bruises all over. He was shaken…”

“The other day, it was the second son. He has been working hard on his dream. I hope he succeeds. I know he will, yet I fear for him and the uncertainties that life holds…”

“And then my grandchild, I read so many things on the paper, hear news on the TV.. and I start bothering about him.. Till he comes home safe from his school bus…”

And she gets up and walks back into the kitchen. There’s dinner waiting to be made.

Not Enough

So she thought, loving her husband, treating her in-laws as she would her own parents and loving them the same way, being honest and truthful with everyone in the house, and taking up a good share of house hold work should be a good medicine for breaking her in-laws’ hearts with her love-marriage.
But when it was time to look for a suitable match for her brother-in-law, all her in-laws wanted, was a girl from the same community.