Dedicated to the person I love the most

I had never realized how much I needed her till that night. I called her up but the call was received by my neighbour who told me that she was gravely ill and had been admitted in the hospital with very low blood pressure. I had always taken her for granted, thinking – She’ll agree. I don’t need to ask her about this. What if she gets a little angry, I can always appease her...and similar things.

Someone once rightly said that you don’t know how important someone is to you unless they go out of your life. It was at that moment that I realized how much I had depended on her – for everything. A guy of my age generally considers himself quite unemotional; even considering it embarrassing to show his emotions in front of someone else. It was the same for me. Perhaps that is why, on listening to the news of her sickness and realizing that it had been almost a year since I saw her, my first reaction was of trying to remember what all had happened on my last trip home. The thing that I remembered distinctly was a quarrel with her. Although I had said sorry over the phone after I returned to college, it is never the same as meeting personally.

I was still regretting the moment and the reason of the quarrel while packing my bags when it struck me that she might not even be alive when I got there. The thought struck me like lightning and caused me to drop everything that I was trying to force into my bag. I somehow gathered the courage to pack my things and spent the rest of the time crying quietly, crouched on my bed. Though I am an atheist by choice, I distinctly remember praying to the nameless God to keep her well. Even though I don’t know which God I prayed to, I prayed for her well-being and for me to get a chance to say sorry.

The train journey was spent musing about everything that had happened, tears welling up in my eyes every now and then but I was forced to stop them from coming out – I am a guy and guys don’t cry, specially in a train full of unknown people. Although I had packed my iPod, by habit – without thinking, I didn’t even think of taking it out of my bag. It was in this reverie that the train reached Purulia and even then one of my co-passengers had to tell me that it was the last stop and that I should get going.

I caught the first bus I could in order to get home. Getting down at the bus stop, I took an auto straight to the hospital and ran the entire length of the ward to reach the bed she was on. There I saw her, lying peacefully with 3-4 tubes around her and an oxygen mask on her mouth. The doctor told me that she should be fine in a couple of days and that I might take her home after a week. I thanked all the Gods, even those of whom I had forgotten names, for keeping her away from danger.

She was able to open her eyes and look at me by the next day. When I went in front of her, she looked at me as if it was the first and only thing she had expected. She didn’t say a word when I broke down in her lap and cried my heart out. She was confused when I told her that I was sorry for what had happened on my last visit – she had forgiven me a long time ago and even forgotten the matter altogether. And she got angry when I told her that I would follow each and every thing she said from now onwards, her reaction being, “If you don’t show any stubbornness, how would I know that you are my son?”


And that was the moment of my life that I will never forget...

How to?

How do you get the over-excited four-year old kid you are traveling with to shut up and let you concentrate on chatting up the attractive girl sitting next to you in the train? (This was a question I faced recently during my vacations when I was traveling with my nephew.)
1)Tell him to shut up: If it was as simple as that, why would I have been asking this question at all?
2)Buy him something to eat: Anything you throw at him would be consumed before you get to say, “Hi,” and then you would have to drop your plans of starting a conversation because you see him swinging from the shelf. Plus, this would leave you poorer by a few bucks every time you try this.
3)Get him something to read: The most a four-year old kid knows is A B C D and a few rhymes and he would make such a loud noise reciting them that you would wish you hadn’t asked him to do it.
4)Give him your music player to listen to: As soon as he gets his hands on it, he would start trying to dismantle it rather than listening to it, forcing you to wrench it away for safe-keeping.
5)Smack him on the head: This will do the trick only if either he is scared enough to obey you or if he starts crying and goes to sleep thereafter. Since you do not know how hard to hit, the kid will most probably start crying – causing a lot of annoyance to you as well as your fellow passengers. Moreover, if he does not go to sleep it was a futile exercise. To top it all, hitting a kid would give a bad impression on the girl.

If any of you has any other ideas, please suggest.