The Invisible Person

30th June 2012

I have shouted at her, at times for, not preparing my favourite dish just according to the fine taste that I call perfection. But she strove to always put in the right mix of everything, including her love for me, to prepare a dish that’s perfect for my taste and satisfaction. I have shouted at her, at times for, asking me questions that I felt uncomfortable to answer; even though she’d ask not with the intention to fish information and mould me according to her views and ways, but to complete a mental picture of me and the way I spend my daily living life, only because we have been distanced for quite a long time and the complete painting of my life that she had helped create during my growing years, is now a hazy and blurry image; difficult for her to re-paint with the brushes of incomplete information that I intimate to her.

She had come to Delhi and was staying at my sister’s place. I had kept getting calls from my sister for the last two weeks prior to her arrival in Delhi, reminding me to visit her place so that my mom could meet me. According to my sister, my mom was anxious to see me, ever since she was in Delhi. From what I heard, I expected to see my mom throbbing with motherly excitement, eager to embrace me and sweet-talk to me, the way she used to do while preparing me for school.

I rang the door-bell and was greeted by my sister with a pleasant smile. My mom stood in the background of the exchange of pleasantries between me and my sister. Proceeding, me and my mom hugged each other even as she muttered sweet words upon having her eyes satiated with the sight of her son.

But we hardly had a thing to talk or discuss.

My mom sat in a chair across the room and I was comfortably placed on the bed, in a conversation with my brother-in-law, and at the same time engaged in a playful game with my 9 months old nephew. My mom held her gaze sideways, a little lowered than the level of my eye-sight, in a stance that would have made a stranger assume she was a culprit of an offence, of which I was a victim. This sight struck me as a lightning inside and I could not help cursing myself within, for having cut myself off so much that my mom was banished inside her mind from even enjoying an atmosphere of familiarity in the presence of her son.

I felt, I had distanced her from myself, instead of having distanced myself from her.

Seated beside her on the Duronto Express on the night she was to leave Delhi, I suddenly realized that I was sitting next to someone, whose internal thoughts, memories, hopes, desires, expectations, personality, notion of life and achievement, were unknown to me. I understood that while I imagined myself being so close to my mom, I had never attempted to know the person which she was from inside. In actuality, I was never this farthest from any person that I had known as a friend in my life. I had only known her as my mother, never as a person that she really is. She had been an invisible person in my life all this while, making herself known to me only as a mother. I had never attempted to know her thoughts, her views and perceptions, her individual personality and all the things that made her the person she is. Or perhaps, I became so reliant on her as “my mother”, that she had lost all the ingredients that made her the person she “was”.  I was crushed under the thought that the price for my individuality had come at a price that was paid for in a substantial amount by the sacrifice of her individuality.

She sat still staring ahead of her and not turned in my direction. We had lost that touch of familiarity that is so strongly effervescent in any blood relation, even though I felt no dip in the depth of love and affection in the way she hugged me before I alighted the train, even as it was initiated into motion by the designated time of its departure.  

Image from here.