From Nanajan: 21 February 2013

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 21^st 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.