Mummy's New Facebook Post
Mummy keeps coming up to me and telling me to see her new Facebook post. She went on a brief trip to Ganeshpuri and Mumbai. Travel is a luxury she cannot afford since she’s not rich with time. I think the only time she gets to herself is the few hours in the morning before leaving for school. I have seen her on the occasion when I wake up early. She sits on the plastic stool with her morning chai. Ever since she was diagnosed with diabetes, she hasn’t been able to enjoy the taste of sugar in tea, but she seems comfortable with the sugarless concoction she has in her solitude every morning.
It must’ve been the first year my sister moved to Bangalore. When she came back, she kept talking about loneliness and how a new city just forces you to be done. Usually, she does to my father for such advice, for some reason, she feels that only he understands her entirely (maybe he does); nevertheless, in this particular occasion, Papa did not have a lot to say. He is an indoor cat and does not like going outside or anyone coming to him. But my mother spoke of her time in the hostel as a school child.
I think it was middle school, 7th or 8th grade, when she left home to live in a hostel. She said that my Nana ji (her father) never kept her short of books, whatever she wanted came to her, and she drowned herself in them,
“पर कोई कितना ही पढ़ेगा?” (How much can someone actually read?)
On the days when she didn’t have anything else, she used to keep her head on a windowsill and stare into space. That said, like my sister too felt alone, but she used to just sit by herself.
She loves going to temples. In fact, for the past 15 years, all the places we have traveled to have been temple cities. She was most excited about the temples in Ganeshpuri and Siddhivinayak.
The photos she had uploaded on Facebook, she had sent on the family WhatsApp group too. In one of the photographs, she was standing at the black stone steps of Vrajeshwari Mandir in Ganeshpuri.
I went to ask her about the photographs, she smiled widely and started to tell me how there is a local folk story that Shri Ram himself went to the Vrajeshwari temple, her eyes happy to have shared the same steps with her mythical hero.
