The Story of an Old soul in a room of memories

The birds were chirping in the backyard. It must have been five in the morning. I was awake for most part of the night. In fact I have no idea of how long I was asleep. I forgot to ask them the time last night. However, I didn’t seem to fall asleep as soon as they left. It took me hours to contemplate on my next course of action which quite obviously didn’t matter to anyone. I seemed to have dozed off a bit around midnight. It was not the sound sleep I once used to enjoy though. It was the one in which you just take a nap and wake up with a start quite frequently that you don’t know if you could actually call it a ‘Sleep’.

In the beginning it was quite difficult for me, this entire arrangement of leaving me at night and returning in the morning. I was terrified to the core of my safety and security in the lonely house. However, I knew I had no other option. If I move out with any one of them, then it would be a ‘Division of Responsibility’ among my four sons and five daughters. I shall have to be shuttled from one place to another to witness the turmoil that took over the family after their father’s death. Until then, it was Our Home that my children visited once in a while to get together as a family. After his death, it was their bed-ridden mother that they were supposed to visit at least once in a while as a part of their basic responsibility towards their family. The thin line that separated the two phrases brought with it a lot of separations that might need generations to regroup.

Was it a clinking bell in the street? Yes. It must be the paper boy. He shall bang the newspaper hard on the front door as if to show his dissent for being shaken awake such early in the morning to distribute the papers. I was all poised to hear the bang and feel the nostalgia of good old childhood days of rushing to the door to be the first person to catch hold of the newspaper and take it to grandfather’s bedside. We were a family of six girls and four boys with another load of cousins to add to the furore. Being the youngest of all, I used to be the first person on most of the times to bag the trophy and flush it before grandfather with pride as he held out his hand to pinch my cheek in approval. I would then sit with him and start solving the puzzle in the last page. In actual terms, I used to read the phrases out and he was the one who would solve them. I would then jot down the answers and finally go around the house with the solved puzzle in my hands and the pride of solving it beaming in my eyes.

How wonderful it would be to live forever with no great tensions more than a pending homework to weigh on your head! I could then keep sprinting across the garden chasing the butterflies as they just came to life with their tender wings. But then, Grandfather would have to lie forever in his stinking bed with the over-washed blankets always covering his wearing body. May be it was not so difficult for him. He always seemed to smile at me and as long as I was with him, he always kept narrating stories to me, anecdotes from his past and stories of good old days. ‘Good Old Days’, a phrase that I failed to realize back then that kept repeating quite often in his stories. May be it was not all that happy as it seemed to be. To think in clear conscious, it definitely wouldn’t have been simple to live for decades stuck to the bed like a heritage structure that just gets dusted and preserved but never used in day-to-day life.

Was I being over-empathetic? May be not, because that was the same situation I was going through after sixty years of his demise. The only difference was that it feels more painful and more terrifying than anyone would have ever imagined it to be. Living though it and witnessing it are two different worlds. One could never step in both at one single time.  May be his days were better, my grandfather. He had hordes of kids and family members to be by his side throughout the day. His linen was washed even if they were unkempt. Mine, I don’t know when I last had a bath. My children each, had a residence of their own. So, they have attested some domestic help to help with my cleaning and feeding. The domestic help would stay with me till sunset and return after sunrise. May be they were not in talking terms with the moon. Sometimes they don’t show up at all. As I gasp through the pangs of hunger and thirst, a sparrow would come and chirp at my window sill to soothe my pain. I would then know that it was a bright summer morning with the sky as clear as the eyes that reflect it.

The door seems to open. May be they don’t have any great thing to do today. They would cook a hearty meal for themselves and feed me a morsel out of it. They may even change my sanitary napkins. I have lost the instinct to grunge at the stinking smell. My brain doesn’t seem to bother to send any reflexes about smell anymore. It was like the clothes I wear and the bed I sleep in. Sometimes I wonder if there were days when I actually used to run and walk without a bed sticking to my back. I began to consider myself to have born with the bed. Sometimes when one of my children sends a message that they are coming to see their mother, I receive a decent head bath and a glassful of milk which I will have to spit in front of them because I have long forgotten the smell and taste of pure milk.

They would then listen to the woes of the domestic help, give them a bag full of coins and leave with a deep sigh. I would once again get back to my world of solace where there was no place for human voices. It was just the birds and the clanking, clicking sounds of metals that ever bother to distract my peace. The birds would sometimes make me realize that the garden was still intact and the plants were still flowering in my backyard. Sometimes they would make me cry at the fact that the house was so badly kept that weeds have grown as far as my window sill and the house now resembles a haunted house that we once used to stare at from the edge of the adjacent hill.

What was that sound? So many voices at a time! I might be dreaming again. It happens quite often these days. I have long lost the track of time. I don’t know when I fall asleep and when I wake up. My eye-sight had long decided to stay dead in its tracks than to witness all the turmoil that’s about to decent on its owner. But, I don’t think it was a new dream. The voices seem to come closer. Was it one of my loving sons? Or was it a daughter? I don’t know. I couldn’t just make out from the voices. Let them come nearer. If they have come for me, they would definitely come to meet me.

Had someone come? Why weren’t they talking? Hey! Who was it that was lifting me off my bed? It was my sole property in the whole world. It was my extended body. I tear and grab at the lifting hands but to no avail. My hands wouldn’t move from their pre-placed position and my voice wouldn’t reach their ears. I was being moved, they say. I was being moved to a nursing house. The domestic help couldn’t bear with me anymore. They say I was ranting all night. Was I not keeping my words to my own heart? I don’t know. I never knew that there were people around me all night. If there were, then why haven’t they spoken to me? Have I gone deaf too? But I could hear the chirping. No, they were lying. There was none in the house at night. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

And off I go to the nursery house with an aesthetic injection stuck into my veins.