The Past

Its like that famous peacock feather lurking between the brown pages of a bookishly fragrant thick bounded volume, typically stashed away in the middle of the book rack, lost among even bigger volumes, not easily discernible to the ordinary human (translated as the unsuspecting).

Thus was her love, ages ago, perhaps still concealed in the vast library of her father’s house in the deep parts of the country. Wow everything about her past was so far away, so deeply buried. If someone wanted to dig into the years that have passed since her past (somehow no matter how many events have occurred in your life after that significant first, when you mention the word past, it means just that, not events before, not the ones after. Each of us have our own lexicons that we build as we live, and in hers, this is what it will always come to mean), yeah so if someone has to unwrap the layers of living she had surrounded herself with, and reach to the bottom, it might take a laborious hunt. But not to her.

Okay, that does nt mean the new life she had climbed onto( new as in some 20 odd years), and the fruits it bore, the joys it brought are by any means factitious. It’s the irony that life so consequentially displays. That reality is no less important or joyous than magic, that compunction is an unnecessary accompaniment in the already long and trying journey, that with any loss, and any amount of compromise, life can still go on, and so beautifully at that.

Its not often she gets reminded of things left behind, her busy life prevents her from living anywhere but the present, it was a conscious attempt initially, but like all things real, it became a way of living. In all the above ruminations, she was never flustered or doubtful about her happiness. She was happy. For real.

But of late, something reminded her very strongly of that concealed feather, of the alternate beauty of life. When she saw her daughter humming a random tune, gregarious at home, all of a sudden, running to the charger clutching mobile every now and then, she knew it (when your mom suspects you with the slightest of evidence and greatest of intuition, suspect her back!).

When She found her daughter in the situation she had herself foundered years back, her first reaction was not alarm, not of fear, but of déjà vu. Of course the former will follow, come on just because she had her past too, does nt mean she is going to turn into a mom different from the rest. Nope. It’s the gene called motherhood. And an unmistakable one at that. So after the initial déjà vu and the strictly terse reliving of her own past, and the realization that her daughter has grown into a young girl when she was not watching (she wonders when exactly could that possibly be), she now prepared for her daughter to face her, or rather other way round, or whatever. She wanted to sit her down, and induce the wisdom passed on to her (she deliberately ignored how futile it was when her own mom had tried that). She wanted to tell her that this excitement and magic are only sweet beginnings of a heart tearing denouement. But before that, she wanted to make sure of her suspicion; a little dance in the gait, a lingering smile are not proof enough when you are confronting a defiant teen.

She cannot go through bound volumes for peacock feathers, it’s a whole new generation later now. Girls would have gotten much more innovative than that. So what is it these days? Cards? Diary entries? Saved messages? On one of those off days, she tried her hand at the unusually abandoned mobile (maybe some rough patch between them? Oops she was becoming more n more paranoid) she found exactly what she expected. Empty inbox. Carefully cleared call history. Sometimes evidence is conspicuous by its absence. And yet it cant serve as one. Nothing else she could conjure up as proof of her daughters fall.

And One day, totally caught unawares, she stumbled onto something. It was close to midnight, and she was the lone person awake in the whole household. And it was the best time of the day to write. She was an amateur writer (sometimes even if you have been writing for decades, narrators like me would still mercilessly call you amateur, what joy they derive out of it, they alone know), and yeah she was writing, something that had always transcended her to another world, something which was so fundamental to her. when She was happy, she wrote, she was distressed, she wrote,when she was neither, she wrote. Perhaps the only thing that had changed with time, was that she wrote on the computer, than on the aesthetically designed notebooks she had used specifically for that purpose. Well, lets not get into the old people catching up on trends with time, blah, blah, lets just focus! She was writing on the computer.

In one of those thought stalemates, she randomly opened files and began to read. And there she found what she was searching for. Amidst a hundred derelict files of a folder, lay a clandestine beauty, not easily discernible to the ordinary human (translated as unsuspecting). There was the write; it was neither prose nor poem. It was one of those very many categories that lie somewhere between them (and yet we always want to classify any writing in one or the other extreme), a style so unique yet so familiar. An innocence so ingenuous yet so powerful. There she was reading about her daughters first crush, her first blush, her first brush with the magic. She was smiling. Just widely smiling. She dint know if the smile was that of a mother or of a teen, or of the mother who was once just like this teen. She was happy for her daughter. She wanted her to experience this, and the fact that they were so similar in taking in the experience was a flattery, a beauty, a feeling so profound, that she was smiling again and again.

When she crossed her daughters room, towards her own, back to bed, through the half open door, she saw the bluish hue of the room, thanks to the mobile, which illuminated her daughters face in the dark of the night. She knew one day she herself will come and speak to her. For assurance. Or perhaps reassurance. Until then she would dwell in that new found familiarity, not of the situation, but of her daughter.