It’s 5.29 a.m in Toronto 4.29 p.m here as I start writing this and you have been asleep for more than a year now,
pumputu, and we have wept
for you 366 days as I am weeping now sitting here in my veranda on this sunny, bright and cool afternoon with the computer on my lap trying to write about you.
All through this past year I have tried to write about you,
pumputu, and haven’t been able to because every time I tried I couldn’t
continue, finding it impossible to put my feelings into words. How does one talk to a little baby who has
not even learned to talk, whose words are those squeals and gurgles and noises
that still ring in my ears, who communicates with the look in her eyes, with
her hands, who held out her hands with curled fingers indicating that she
wanted to be picked up, who clapped with closed hands when she heard her
favourite nursery rhymes even as she was feeling the pain in her little body,
who suddenly pushed back on my chest as she was in my arms to look up at my
face to see who was carrying her and who, though I was afraid she would start
crying when she found it was not her ammu, put her little head back on my
shoulder in reassurance, accepting me and knowing me perhaps as her Nanajan, and
closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
Those little incidents, those looks of yours, the look of pain and
discomfort on your face for more than a month, how the memory of those looks
pains all of us now, pumputu. How do I talk to you who had only just begun to
be spoken to by everybody in baby talk?
I know, though, that if I had talked to you at the time, when you left
us, I would probably have been able to.
As the years go by and we keep your memory alive will I be able to speak
to you or will it get even more difficult? If you had been here now, a prattly
pranky over-energetic little two year old, I would have been talking to you on
Skype, all of us would have talked to you, as we do with little two years old,
trying to make you learn more and more words.
I can imagine doing that with you, as you sat on your alphabet mat in
your living room up there in Toronto and as we watched you on our computer
screen, watched you after your second birthday, watched you when there would be
no more significance to 21st February than it has had over the
years. Watched you grow up, heard you
call us Nanajan and Naniamma, and maybe even on a happier and better second
trip to your home than the one we actually took, walk with your hand in my hand on the trails, in the park, on
the green grass in the yard, wheeled you around a supermarket in a cart, picked
you up and carried you as you slept, put you on the sofa to sleep when we got
home just as we used to do with your ammu when she was little. I still do these things in my mind, see you
grow up, go to school, ride a bike, maybe even if I was granted long life see
you go to university, become an accomplished young lady, the boro apu to your
siblings, maybe to your cousins. It will
all have to be in my head now, the same head that tries to hold all the memories it
possibly can of your twelve months in
the world. I cannot picture you in the
other world, pumputu, only in this one, and as the sunlight withdraws from the
garden in front of me and as the little girls of the neighborhood come out
riding their bikes and the birdcalls of the season sound louder than the noise
of the traffic or the shouts of the little boys who are playing cricket on the
field in the distance, I wish and wish that you were there still, in Toronto, in
your own little pink bedroom sleeping the good sleep of the early morning
before your ammu came to wake you up to take you to your baby sitter or just to
check up on you now that it is 6.26 a.m and I have spent an hour remembering
you more than writing about you.
