Tara stared outside her bedroom window. The cold autumn breeze rustled past the orange-red leaves in the fading twilight. She watched as it stripped the trees naked of their foliage. The imagery made her eyes sting. Just that very morning, had she not stared at the single blue of her home pregnancy test? She felt.. empty. She plopped lifelessly on the bed. “Even the trees look sad, Ma”, she whispered, “without their leaves.” She missed her mother. It had been more than a year that she passed away. “You didn’t have to go away so soon now, did you? You had to be here.. for me. For your grandchild”. She sighed.
It’s strange but sometimes having these conversations with her “Ma” felt good, comforting her even, in the most inexplicable way.
Suddenly she jolted upright and walked straight to her wardrobe. She remembered something as if from long ago. She swung it open and pulled out the content of her last drawer. It was her mother ‘s silk scarf. The one she had loved as a child. It had been a while. Holding it up in her hands now, she sank her weary head into it. She inhaled her mother. The tears welled up in her eyes and she wept. Her sobs came in starts.
Sometimes that is all it takes to trigger a memory, doesn’t it? A picture. A scent. A song. And letters.
Letters, written to her by her mother as she moved to college to study Architecture. Letters when she changed cities for pursuing a career when she got married and they could not see each other as often as they hoped to. In the fabric of time, they weaved their lives together somehow, in these letters between the two of them. “Aw, my favourite child!”, her mother always wrote. “You’ve taken after me! How you love writing! Why? You could write really soulful stories for me to read someday.”
She remembered how her mother would read out to her from her favourite books and the two would share a laugh or when her mother would ask her what moved her most about the story. “You were a good mother to me, Ma.” She smiled sniffingly, fondly at the memory. “Perhaps someday I could too, tell a story to my little one. Just like you..” She heard herself say it out loud and then the words trailed off. She rose and walked slowly, deliberately to her bedroom desk. There was a quiet resolve in her stride. Her tears had now dried off on her cold cheeks. She sat at her computer and the screen stared back.
“You would write to me big fat beautiful stories one day, Child. They are already packed inside of you, waiting to burst forth open!”
“Ma! I’m an architect; you know I could never find the time…”
“Rubbish!”
She smiled now, wistfully at the memory.
And typed the words on the blank page.
For my Mother.
And began. Her very first best-selling Book.
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