Epiphany
“Don’t call me again. We’ve all but forgotten you…”, Shankar cut the phone line on his mother. He looked down at his mobile and then the knuckles where his mother hit him with a steel ladle, screaming “Don’t touch her!”. Several years on, he can still feel the pain.
It was the day Munni, his mother’s fourteen-year-old sister - the joyous, sparkling kid - went silent. It can’t be that she was missing her parents or anything. Shankar’s father married mother who had no one but Munni and vowed to take care of them both.
He remembers father walking in that day, looking neither left nor right ... just going straight to the plate of food that was laid out for him. Munni gulped her last morsels and darted out of the room.
After lunch, father announced that he plans to rest at home. Picking up his bag to go back to school, Shankar caught the horrified look on his mother’s face. He saw her go after Munni, getting her ready to take her with her. “Where are you taking the poor thing? Thought she needed rest!”, father called after mother. By then both of them already found a rickshaw.
It was getting late. After a lonely dinner father was sitting on the front porch, smoking. Old Binayakda passing the house on his post-dinner stroll caught sight of the pale, shaken Munni being helped into the house by mother. “One of those mysterious female ailments!”, father muttered to Binayakda by way of explanation and went on to pull harder on the cigarette.
After that day, mother was somewhat lost. She no longer sat with Shanker to help with homework. Never came to the school to speak with the teacher. Mother, to whom Shanker’s schooling was the single biggest obsession.
Soon mother pulled Munni out of school and set her up as a trainee health attendant with the lady doctor. Munni began to live at the nursing home. The doctor needed her so much that she wouldn’t allow Munni to take a break to be with Shankar’s family.
“Why have you pulled Munni out of school, ma? The Principal is upset and wants to see you. She thinks we are not all that poor and Munni is too young to quit school to work”, Shankar mustered enough courage one day to say to his mother. Mother just stared at him and let it pass.
Munni died soon after. She seems to have popped some medicines without knowing what they were for. Throughout the funeral and the lull thereafter, it was like both father and mother were frozen inside. They listened to everyone. Said nothing.
That weekend mother left. Father kept telling everyone who cared to listen that she was living with an old flame of hers and that she just used him to bring up her sister. Shankar began to loathe the selfishness of his mother and couldn’t fathom how his mother could just leave him, her own son.
And then this desperate phone call on the day his girl friend has come to meet his father and his marriage is all but fixed up! Where was she when he was growing up and needed her the most?
Shankar turned impatiently from the window back to the dining table. For a moment he forgot where he was … he picked up the ladle on the table and hit his father hard on the knuckles, screaming “Don’t touch her!”
Shankar walked out of the house dragging his girl friend with him, all the while looking for the last caller’s number on his mobile …
