Nothing Goes Wasted in Life :

Snigdha having dodged past the onrushing defender, passed the ball on to his unguarded cousin, Binita, running parrellel to him with no one but the goalkeeper in front. Binita, in a hurry, fumbled before taking a blinder of a kick but the ball sailed miles over the bar as they all collided just outside the penalty box.

What a waste! Snigdha thought to himself as he got up and started dusting himself off. The score would have been 3-0 in favour of his team in this galli football, where the locals, irrespective of age or gender, played on holidays. 

Binita apologised profusely, saying,"I'll work hard not to waste such a sitter."

On getting back home, Snigdha feeling hungry, headed straight for the kitchen. He found his Ma, kneeling all by herself near the mud oven and making a mound of dough in a pot. Mound of dough as their family was a large one with five brothers and three sisters. Four of his brothers were already married as were two of the elder sisters. The two married brothers had already left home to curve out their own destinies.

Why were none of the sisters-in-law or his sister there helping Ma? Snigdha found himself wondering. 

"I'm starving right now, Ma? Lemme have this milkshake, " Saying this, he picked up the bottle from the rack nearby.

Meera Devi, her face crimson due to the heat coming from the oven, looked up at her youngest son, wiped the sweat off her temple with the edge of her sari, and broke into a smile. 

"I'm done with the curry. If you can wait for five minutes more, I can give you rotis and the egg curry for dinner."

"No worries, Ma. I'll wait," he replied and proceeded to the rack fixated in the wall behind her to pick up the spice jars. Snigdha noticed the bottle of Horlicks lying nearby. He loved the staff in his milk but even when eaten raw, straight out of the jar, it tasted delicious. He quickly uncorked the jar, poured a palmful of the powdery Horlicks on to his hand and put it all at once onto his tongue. 

"God! How can this Horlicks be so yummy?" He said as he put the lid back on. 

Meera Devi looked lovingly at her son. With some Horlicks around his mouth, he looked a sight.

One day he would turn out to be a handsome man. What is more, he would be a very good human. She thought to herself as she put the round, iron plate on top of the flaming fire. The fire was not yet ready for the rotis to be heated and baked properly yet. She turned her head just for a second to look at her son looking at her, and gazed back at the oven. It would take another five to ten minutes for the fire to be ready. Her son shouldn't wait for dinner any longer. Thinking like that, she bent her head towards the mouth of the oven and started blowing into it. 

Snigdha was still relishing the Horlicks in his mouth when suddenly he noticed his mother blowing into the oven. The ambers of the coal in the oven were flowing all around. A few even flew into his mothers eyes. As tears ran down her cheeks and she stopped blowing momentarily, her face reddish in the light of the flaming fire - Snigdh felt sorry for his Ma. Poor lady, she never complained about doing this hazardous job day in and day out! 

"Let me help, Ma, otherwise, you'll be sightless soon."

Meera Devi couldn't help chuckling hearing her son talk like that. 

"If you really want to help, you can call your Sister down. Then both of you can have dinner together." She asked her son and went back to blowing. 

"Okay, Ma. Reena is already on her way down. Can I help you make the balls out of the dough then? I really enjoy making those balls and I'd love to learn how to make the round-shaped rotis one day." Snigdha was not willing to let his Ma distract him from his intention of helping her. 

"Please, Ma. Let me make the balls at least. It's not difficult. I won't spoil even a little bit of the dough, I promise.. Please, Ma, please." 

The pleading look in her son's eyes was what did the trick for Snigdha. Meera Devi pulled her son, a bit reluctantly, to the empty pira on the floor beside her, away from the heat of the oven and pushed forward the pot of dough. 

"Just take a handful of it at first, " Meera Devi told her son showing her son by example, how to do it. 

The boy, not even ten, was already in class five. He was actually admitted in the local boys school before time. But was he not intelligent?

"So, how has your day been, my son? How many goals did you put in today?" Unfamiliar with the terms of the game, she asked her son as she started making the roti on the belun-chaki, a rounded, raised piece of wood used for flattening the ball of dough into the perfectly round roti.

Something shot through her heart as she watched Snigdha squeezing out a bit of the dough into his open palm and start making it into a ball. Was there any mother in the world who got happy finding her child doing any laborious work? The boy though seemed to be doing a fine job of it. 

"I scored 1 goal but could have scored another but for Binita. My attempts at teaching her the basics, are a sheer waste. Football isn't for girls, Ma."

Meera Devi took the pumped-up roti off the oven and said to her son, "Nothing goes wasted, Baba. There is no such game or work meant only for girls or boys."

Look, Ma. Have I not made the ball of the correct size and shape?" Snigdha shouted out to his mother, and finding the glow on his mother's face, exclaimed:

"I've done it, Ma! I've done it!" Soon he was making the balls of dough and arranging them in a nice circle on the plate. 

That was how Snighda learnt to make the lechis (balls) with the dough. It didn't take him long to graduate from making the lechis to the rotis. 

*****************************************************

Time marched on and the boy went to study in college. Meera Devi's happiness knew no bound the day her son, the last of all her offsprings, graduated from college. In some ways, Snigdha graduating from college was a dream come true for Meera. 

She was an outstanding student in that all-girls school in Jashore in modern Bangladesh. Her parents had tried to inculcate the best values in their eldest child. Life, after marriage, was far from what any girl of Modern India could even imagine! But all her dreams and hopes of being an educated girl, were curtailed with the marriage. She was too busy serving her in-laws to notice how her other children completed college. Now with Snigdha graduating, it was as if she was herself awarded the degree! 

With pride writ large on her face, Meera looked at her youngest son at the news as Naresh Babu paid a hundred-rupee-note to the servant to go out and fetch sweets to celebrate the success of their youngest son. 

Later, that night, while tucking the quilt in tightly around her son, Meera Devi cast a wistful glance at her son. Snigdha, sound asleep, turned towards his mother. How, with the beard and all, he had grown into a man within no time! 

The day was not far when he would get a job, start earning money. It was only a matter of time when he would find someone for himself, get married, settle down to raise a family. Thinking about her son's marriage, Meera Devi looked up and said a silent prayer :

"I want him to be happy always with all my heart, God. Let not the Shadows of Darkness cloud his life even for a brief period. Let him be healthy, wealthy and happy with his family, always.. "

Binita, the cousin, in the meanwhile, was creating ripples as a rising woman striker in WFL in Kolkata.

In due course of time, Snigdha landed up with a job, got married and sired two daughters.When his elder daughter was in class-three, Meera Devi took a quiet leave of the world. She passed away in her sleep, left under the care of a paid nurse as she was, by her children. 

Life went on as usual. That fatal day, some twenty years after the demise of his Ma, Snigdha came back home from office to find his wife in a foul mood. There was a fierce scene between the couple. One thing led to another as neither of them wanted to keep quiet. Finally, out of utter rage and frustration, Snigdha smacked his wife on the cheek when things, he thought, were going out of control. She left for her parents's house that very night with the daughters.

******************************************

The day after the departure of his wife, Snigdha was still lying in bed, when he wanted to have a few bites. He hadn't taken anything on the previous night and there were as if rats gnawing at the intestines in his stomach. 

He stepped into the lonely kitchen and scurried over to the refrigerator. There was a steel tiffin container. Snigdha took it out and forced the lid open. There was the left over dough of the previous night in there. He pulled the content to his nose. It smelled all right. Hurriedly, he started looking for the belun-chaki next. He was surprised to find his vigour back as he essayed at making the long-forgotten lechis first before flattening and baking the rotis on the gas oven. 

What looked like the outline of a thin smile hovered over his lips as he remembered his Ma after a long time. Her near-forgotten words popped up in his head from nowhere:

"Nothing goes wasted, Baba. There is no such work as meant only for girls or boys."

The End