To My Mom

You know dear...

I wrote umpteen poems and two novels almost on you...

Still...

December comes with you hovering over me like a sting of deep felt pathos...

Still

December fourth comes every year since two thousand and three...

Bearing bleakest memories of my long and short life!

O' mom!

Every year since...

I had received that phone call from the hospital...early morn!

'Please hurry! She is terribly unwell...'

I, being sleepy, couldn't have caught the voice properly, trailing all the way...

I had returned only a few hours back...to my sleepless home...

And rode out again...through the vacant, sleepy, foggy street...

I rode as if there was no tomorrow...jumping every traffic signal red...

Breaking every traffic rule...afraid of being chased by dogs of the street and sergeants waiting like hounds behind those white street corner kiosks!

I ran through all...the speed breakers...the tramps...the milkmen...the newspaper boys...the swallows picking grains left by a speeding goods carrier ahead...

I jumped all to see you there-

At your last and final refuge...bed no 303...

With pipes and monitors and needles all over you...

The doc was there too...

He embraced me even before I looked at your closed eyes...fast closed...as if sleeping!

God!

Such a bleak and blank moment...I have never witnessed...

Such bleak and blank day!

I stood there, stupefied...by your bed side, mom...

By your white, clean bed...

While you took the journey...transcendental!

(In memory of my mother, Sefali Ghosh Dastidar Dutta, who passed away on 4th Dec, 2003)