Standing restlessly near the entrance to Netaji Ward of Peerless Hospital, I watched lots of people walking past me during the visiting hours.
"Let her go. She can't if you people cling on to her like this!" someone barked at me from the corridor inside. She must have seen Ma being shifted back up to the ICU on the floor above from the General Ward earlier.
I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but I don't know what held me back.
*
"We tried our best," The Doc told my wife and me the next morning, “but we had to give in to Old Age and the resultant multi-organ-failure of your Mother.”
I'll remember the scene of her still body being carried back to our ancestral home from the hospital.
It was a windy day. Sitting in a cab behind the hearse, I kept looking at the body inside the rectangular, glass-box.
The person, who meant the world to me, was bidding me her final ‘good bye’, but the enormity of the loss was yet to sink in!
With a heavy-heart, I glanced upward.
The skies never looked bluer!
*
On the thirteenth day of her demise, there was the shraddh ceremony going on. Still depressed, I found someone with a steel tray, passing some pakoras around.
"She loved entertaining guests. No wonder the pakoras are so delicious." Someone remarked.
Something Ma told me long ago, came back to haunt me: “You do whatever you want to for me as long as I’m alive. It doesn't matter what you do to my dead body."
Thinking of her words, I broke into a smile and stretched my hand to pick up a few pakoras from the plate.
Ma never wanted any of her offspring to be unhappy.
Rathin Bhattacharjee from Kolkata, India, joined BCSC as an English
Teacher in 1990. Awarded HM's Gold Medal in 2018, he resigned from the
post of the Principal of SXPS, Joypur, India in March, 2024.
He has been published in a host of Indian/international magazines with five books to boot.
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