Mother, Moon and the Child

When her child cried aloud incessantly in a cool winter evening, she tried all her tricks she knew, to make her child stop crying, but in vain. Father had not returned home after a full day’s strenuous work in the field, yet. As the Sun bid goodbye for the day, it was almost getting dark. Birds have just come back to their nests, to feed their small ones, who were eagerly waiting, as usual. The mother birds were chirping and enjoying the cool light breeze on their way back, flying home. It was really a pleasant sight to the children who were regularly playing in the courtyard of their homes in the evenings, after returning from school. Sometimes they were lucky enough to have a glimpse of rainbows over the horizon with birds flying in the forefront, during monsoon months. Nature’s beauty made them feel happy, despite their stomachs being empty.

The pungent smoke from the kitchen was unbearable for the child and the elders. They were all coughing in the home, gasping to breathe. Women in the kitchen were preparing the regular staple food for the dinner for the whole family, but the kind of mix used in the curry preparation did not go well with all, on that day. Not only was the firewood dry enough to burn easily but there was also not enough ventilation, so to say, lack of oxygen, in the kitchen, to discharge the choking smoke into flames, which otherwise could have reduced the smoke.

The use of electricity and liquefied petroleum gas for cooking was far beyond their dreams or even reach, in those days ( first half of the 1960s), as their village was hundreds of kilometers away from the District headquarters. The elected representatives rarely cared for the welfare of villagers. They used lamps with silver and golden coloured holders, made of tin, with a fat belly to hold the fuel and narrow neck with uniformly and precisely cut edges, to hold the glass chimneys firmly, allowing movement of the hot air up. The fuel used in the lamps was kerosene, which was available in limited quantity for every household in the nearest outlets managed via Public Distribution System of the Government, but every householder was forced to carry their ration cards to the outlet to make necessary entries, after every purchase.

Though the reason for the child’s cry could not be identified by mother exactly, she believed that it may be due to stomach pain or some other stomach disorder, which can’t be that much serious, so as to take the child to the family physician. But she thought it was necessary to take out the child immediately outside their home, to their courtyard where people can breathe tirelessly. Their courtyard was demarked from the loose mud field ahead, made with a large thick mud platform on both sides of the main passage which leads to the gate. It was almost dust-proof, after the splash of cow dung solution placed uniformly, during those winter days. She carried the child in her arms and walked to and fro, in the courtyard to calm the child. She was singing the lullabies she learned from the ancestors after slight modification in lyrics, here and there, so as to sweeten more.

She suddenly saw the moon appearing in the clear blue sky. Luckily, it was a full moon day. The courtyard was brimming with off-yellow light of the moon; the fragrance from the half-blown jasmine flowers spread everywhere. Various thoughts came to her mind by seeing the moon and all those thoughts finally culminated into a story, which she started narrating to the child. While walking, she showed the child, the double size thin shadow of both child and herself, opposite to moon, which made the child bewildered. Though the child could not understand what the mother was telling throughout, he slowly stopped crying and wanted to hear more of such stuff. After a few more steps, she could feel that the child slept in her shoulders, in the process. This magic clicked and thus it became a routine for the mother and child to walk in the courtyard whenever the moon appears, despite the child not crying at all, but both of them enjoyed the scenes. This resulted in creation of more stories by mother on seeing the moon and the storytelling continued till he reached the age of six.

Now, after so many years, while sitting alone in an armchair, at the corner of his home at this Metropolitan city, near the glass window, enjoying rains, sipping coffee, the old reminiscences still drag him to the country courtyard more often; lead him to dream big and pave for a creative writing. Though his mother died long back, the fond memories of childhood never fade away, but help to create more literary works.

His eyes were suddenly attracted to the caption on the wall hanging –“It does not matter whether you live in a big city or a community of homes, the real life is within.”

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