Bob DCosta (India)
When the helpless little bundle stirs and the rustle of the tiny feet brush ever so gently against the cute little mattress, the sound of the movement reaches your ears even when you are in the kitchen, and you leave your post at the microwave oven and go towards the bed and inspect if your baby is convenient or not, that is parenthood.
And when dusk has fallen and the western sky has already gone under the covers of repose and prodded you to start your evening to join the enthusiastic bards for an event, you record your poem and send it to the curator telling him you are in no position to leave your little Happiness alone, that is parenthood.
When Friday evening arrives and, with a hot-wheels car in your large hand you make vroom-vroom noises and distort your face that puts the award-winning clown to shame. And that is the time you hear the giggles of a soft thin voice next to you laughing at your antics, that is parenthood. And a few years pass by and now his attention towards the guitar standing against the bookshelf as a lonesome cowboy has turned to musical happiness for soon, he hums Cotton Fields with his father.
By the time your child has grown to a seven-year-old and you look back and relish the memories of the walk with him over the wooden bridge. And his wanting to don on a neck tie and take his dad for an evening walk and point out to the toy shop owner the red flaming little red car for his dad, and his dad hides his face behind his palm knowing the car is for his little child, but the little has become the dad, that is the joy of parenthood.
And when you look back, eleven summers have walked down the street of your life, eleven summers without a single poem. And the government fell and a new one formed by then. Summer days became hotter and flowers withered by night more than what the sunlight could not achieve to attempt, and the little one is not a little one any more but working in another city.
When your eyes fall on the mirror, you realize that the first strand of white in your hair has turned other strands to a similar colour and you realize years have drifted away over the river of your life without a single poem composed, but lines and poetic phrases were scattered in the waste-basket of your mind. And then you recall them and jot them down in your notebook where scribbles of your little one have filled one-third of its pages. You smile as you imagine he stands behind you, his little hands on your shoulders. And when you stroll through your re-writings, you have already written close to a hundred poems.
You celebrate, then, the missed years as not missed but enjoyed which you speak of at the book launch.
*
Travel
The song has stopped its wails, its head out of the flute from the neck. The distant sun pushes its light to fix it on the bent side of the child’s head, desiring to soften the honey of its brown-ness so that it will, in slow degrees as an ant crawls, reach the child’s ear. That will wake his tiredness, wake and help him to straighten the head of its song, so that, yes, so that the two-year-old will not be fatherless but go back into his mother’s womb and join into one family of three. The father there will hold his baby, rock him in the darkness of the womb’s light, and perhaps play peek-a-boo, for his ear is still dead without the giggles of his little one. He can only paint the sea brown, the mountain purple for when his child is with him. He is known by his child’s father.
Even the flower of black worships him then, her paintbrush becomes a magic wand, her mind is a pacific-ocean of meditation.
The father has traveled into the womb of meditation with his son.
*
A Whatsapp video: “This is the lotus here. Blooming,” and she holds it tenderly in her left hand, as tenderly as one holds a new-born. “And it is raining. So, I wish you good morning.” I observe a smile in her voice, though the camera is showing the flowers and flowers of her terrace garden.
Next, she cannot be found. She was at the terrace, loosening the soil of one of her favourite plants when it began to drizzle, and when soon the drizzle turned its character to a harsher one with more confirmed drops falling as pellets to attack her, she was more mindfully determined to continue nurturing her love. But now she is not there. He scans the terrace a hundred and one time. Next, suddenly, a cold shower falls on his head, pushing him out of his nightmare.
It has been quite a time since he has not heard from her. He called her but her phone was switched off. He sent her a text, and it went unnoticed because he continued checking his Whatsapp text every time. But no reply. She was in his thoughts the entire day. And the thoughts slow-cooked themselves to worry.
By the next morning, he found he had sent a few more text messages. That afternoon a ping sounded and when he opened the Whatsapp window, it said. I will let you know. Some news from her. That is some elation for his soul. A faint light glows in his heart. But, is she alright? How is her health? Her birthday came. Why didn’t she respond to his wish? Questions after questions attack him. His days are battered, though his work diverts his mind. But every now and then – the anxiety – a fevered caged bird, stares at him from weak hollow eyes.
The other side of parenthood he never thought existed is now his teacher again, teaching him that every day is one of learning, beginning from tying her pigtails to being her companion by playing with her dolls till she prepares her dad a cuppa green tea on a visit to the city, and she shares the link of a female baul singer for him after she is gone.
*
Just a While Ago
Just a while ago, the sun appeared today, a look of lostness on his soul. Somewhat like me?
Yesterday, after you left, the sun fell into a deeper pit, vertical and horizontal thoughts constantly criss-crossing over the pathway of his senses. I remember your fingers in a graceful move as you dined and your words opening the petals of the edibility from the plate in all gentleness. Even the water in the glass listened never as mesmerised with the gloss from the neon light on its body. I have never looked at you so close, never sat beside you closer. There were times I missed you as much as the desert misses the rain in its thirstiness. There were times, when all alone, I imagined fever had struck me, and getting to know, you appeared by my side, your tiptoes matching the beatings of your heart in worry-ness, your fingers trying to understand the language of the temperature, as their softness moved on my forehead, through my hair, stopping now and then. At times you appeared, an angel sitting on that sofa, opening Wizard of the Crow on a random page, and as I lifted my head, I found the roundness of your eyes moving over the eyelids, for, I must declare, the blackness of your eyelashes and your eyes have trapped me more than the fragrance of the navel of a musk deer, your pair of eyebrows smoother than any paths we have ever walked upon. And that night I sat on the couch you had sat, my legs folded as you had done like a yogi’s, dressed in white, and placing my arm on the armrest, I could feel my hand resting on yours, for the softness that lingered will soothe the loneliness of my old age for my memory has captured this moment for that moment when forsakenness will approach and possess me like a demon, and alone-nity will breathe down my neck in a constant motion of a quiet river. That’s the politics of loneliness when this body will lie in the earth, a funeral of ants, in black, moving forward to moisten my forehead with their last kiss.
A dad always waits for his daughter’s return.