The story of a mother and her son

 

Naveen Baman usually set out on his hunt for the day after touching his mother’s feet. It was theoretically a very moral-heavy schedule. Much to matrilineal delight, his father would get a patriarchal heartburn as the son won’t even look in his direction as he stepped out for a well-paid day in many senses of the term, that included apart from money—his first love—winning some affection from some fresh female in his life.

With each minute ascending into relevance, the mother would wait for her darling son to return at night to serve him dinner, however late it was. She was always there, awake and alert, like a petite watchman on duty. The blooming mechanisms of a very interesting outdoor life got him curious about liquor one day. He tasted it, found it interesting, drank then, and led by an over-zealous assertion of free spirits gulped down pegs after pegs. From the top of an oozing enthusiasm, he toppled down suddenly and was blacked out.

The moment you pass out you turn small and insignificant. With monumental presence of mind, his drinking peers left him in front of his street and vanished into the profoundly dark swathes of night. They were well aware of the fulfilling bond between the mother and the son and hence were scared of the mother’s stormy tantrums when she would see her son heaped out of senses.

Clueless about how to proceed further, he chose half of the water drain and the other half of the street to lie down and snore. The air was laden with disintegrating gloominess. Much scandalized over her son’s thunderous misjudgment, the mother arrived at the scene with a few members of the extended family to salvage her son from the clutches of the corrupt and corroded episode.

They got into the act of hauling him up. Naveen had very serious objection to this disturbance. The mother was shouting amidst a flurry of teary promos. With his few traces of consciousness still in his grasp, he made out that this old, shrieking woman was the ringleader in dislodging him from his favorite drain. ‘Bhola, give me a rope. We have to strangulate this old woman. She has too big a tongue and prattles too much,’ he yelled to his cousin brother. The mother indeed was famous for her talkative tongue.

As they dragged him to the house, he kept on shouting, ‘We have to kill this woman by hanging!’ The father looked from a distance. He felt as if his son was talking sense now, even though under the influence of liquor. But truth has to be accepted in whatever form it arrives. So he felt happy inside.

Naveen started snoring after a tornado of proclamations to get his mother hanged by the strongest rope in the house. The next day, when he got down to touch her feet she kicked him. She did it for a week. On the eighth day, she put her hand on his head. ‘You are a nice son! Devils are the ones who made you drink,’ she declared.