The huge sense of self-righteousness has its origins
in a very little dark space in our egoistic chamber where mammoth ghosts of
judgement and opinions burst to their seams. They have been suffocating in a
little dark space and that’s why they run wild to assert and claim more
territory in other’s mind once the door gets unlocked.
۞
Ma is still around and taking care of us even though
she left her body almost two and half years ago. The other day, one of my
aunties in our extended family lost her gold earring. Now it’s a catastrophe
for a woman to lose her gold ornament. Apart from the economic loss, they take
it as a bad omen also. Give her two for her lost gold piece, she but will still
be sad and sullen about the lost one. My aunt is a very hardworking woman. She
has a set-up routine of household chores like my mother had. Aunty gets up
early and her day involves morning walk in the fields around the village, visit
to the temple, many rounds to the cattle barn at a distance from the house and
the rest of the routine tasks in their sprawling countryside house. Given her
large area of movement over the dusty village streets, even to think of
pinpointing some specific location where the probability of finding the earring
was higher than others seemed a futile exercise. She and the family looked into
all nook corners of the house. The temple premises were scanned and so were the
streets and paths where she had walked on that day. Much disturbed she tried to
sleep at night but sleep was nowhere nearby. She was in tension. Around half
past three in the morning, she got a short span of sleep and my mother appeared
in her dream. Auntie says my mother was seen brooming the streets on the side
of the house and the little square falling on the other side of our house.
Mother always cleaned the surroundings after cleaning the house. Young women
less than half her age won’t even think of cleaning the neighbourhood streets
for others to walk. But that’s how mother was. She lived a life that wasn’t
strictly chained by mine or your boundaries. In the dream, cleaning the street
in front of the house, mother said to auntie, ‘Don’t take so much of tension.
Now go to sleep peacefully. You will find your gold earring. It’s lying near
the platform facing the street by our house. There is a splinter of bamboo near
it.’ Well, around eight in the morning auntie recalled the dream and went out
to the said place. The earring was found exactly at the place mother had
indicated. Just imagine dozens of people had been passing the spot and nobody
spotted it. But nothing can miss a mother’s eyes. She is still around, keeping
a watch over the proceedings of our follies from a higher dimension.
