Nostalgia.

As they say all good things come to an end, so is mine coming to an end.  As the date of my departure is approaching, my heart is sinking deeper and deeper. My parting with my parents gets all the more difficult, each time I visit them. This fact, perhaps, is the witness to the increasing hardship in my personal life. I had waited for this vacation for so long and now it is time to bid it goodbye.

Life is so strange. There used to be a time I felt exactly opposite of what I do today. It is not that I do not want to meet my husband after almost a month-long holiday, but this time certainly the pain of leaving mummy, papa is more than the excitement of meeting my sweetheart or rather going back to him.

Meetings and partings are the ways of life – Rabindranath Tagore once mentioned in one of his stories. I cannot better understand the meaning of the line than now.

But what is it which is pulling me back this time? What is it which is making me more nostalgic than ever before? May be the pain of seeing my parents alone is holding me back. My heart goes out more for mummy. She spends the whole day in household work and eats alone with nobody around to talk except the idiot box. My mother reminds me of a character, Molina, from the book ‘The French Lover’ by Taslima Nasrin . The only difference being my father is a much more sensible and caring person than Molina’s husband.

Everybody waits for something in their lives but this is the most obvious kind of wait which scares me more often than not.  What can I do for them? Not much! It is today that I feel for them, tomorrow when I go back and get engrossed in my work, I may not feel so intensively for them.

Well, going down the memory lane, my mother’s life has always been like this without much change. She has always been serving us incessantly and tirelessly and without a single complaint ever. I am sure I must have made more complaints to my husband in three years of my married life than my mother did in 25 years of hers. What does she get in return? The elation of watching her children climb the ladder of success, probably (unlike her).

We seldom spare a thought for our parents which is so saddening a fact. My feelings for my mother pour out more as I gather the previous incidents with much more poise than before. After each exam result or after each small achievement in school, we could see the glow of success on her face. How many times we spared a moment to tell her that it was because of her never-ending supply of unconditional love and world’s best food that helped us concentrate more on our work? But we did spare moments to complain about the bad lunch or dinner, if at all.

We keep saying thank you and sorry in our professional life for the slightest joy or the slightest pain we get or give to others. Fair enough... It appears too dramatic to offer sorry or thank you to a family member, but I still believe these words speak a million when put properly in front of anybody, be it a family member. At the end of the day, they have the same human emotions like everybody, may be more so for us. Why is it that our dearest relations suffer most gravely? Some questions always remain unanswered. In a bid to please almost every living creature on earth around us, we end up displeasing our most nearest and dearest ones. Probably because we assume, we can apologise to them anytime. Yes! We can but certainly that anytime never gets a time.

I may sound like a philosophy professor but sometimes I cannot help but fathom certain queries. What is the purpose of one’s life? What does one live for? Let us find out.

Definitely not to do endless paperwork or attend endless meetings  or answer endless calls or sms endless texts or mail files. Definitely not for them.

Then Is it to earn more and more money? It may appear so in the beginning, but I can bet my whatsoever possessions on the fact that even if you ask the richest person on earth whether he is satisfied with what he has, the answer certainly will not be a ‘YES’. I cannot answer on behalf of the rich people apparently, but I can for sure understand the feeling one experiences after achieving a set goal. The feeling is of ‘emptiness’. And that is the point when one starts seeking solace in one’s family. Some are very lucky to be not too late but some are not.

Queerly enough, we can take the pain of taking out the laptop, putting the USB and connecting the internet (Oh! We so cannot do without it even a day). But cannot simply stretch our arms to reach out to people nearest or rest a soothing touch on their shoulder. While apparently, they are the ones who care a zillion times more about us than our so called ‘DISTANT FRIENDS’. How ironical is that?

Are we not becoming more like machines? The day is pretty much in my visibility boundary when we will switch to making ‘humans like robots’ from making the other way round.

Well, I am determined to change myself before it is too late. Are you? It is always easy to go with the flow but very challenging to sail against it. Guys, why do something easy in one life?