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A life where she had no one, no emotions left, no innocence felt, and no shelter or a life she would give birth to, me, who would feel like an orphan, after knowing, how much her mother dint want her, and to top it she didn't have a father. My mother was still looked at, with utter disrespect, she being single. Who would understand anyway, being a single mother is seldom by choice, and is mostly by chance. Not letting your child have a second parent is never by choice for the most part. Being a single mom is like driving a car at 60 miles per hour with no brakes. I think somewhere, a new life inside her womb, gave my mother a new life. Someone to come back home to, and someone to live for, knowing death is never by choice. As much as she wanted everything to end just then, the day when she regretted being a woman, she now knew when you are a mother; you are never really alone in your thoughts. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. She now knew the moment a child is born, she would be reborn. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge. She now knew Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. Page 18
Life felt different now. It was now a combination of states. I felt like I was loosing my old life. I was already missing, the evening walk back from school. Like the dew on the mountain, the foam on the river, the bubble on the fountain, that life was lost. But better to have loved and lost, than to not have loved at all, they say. We never understand how little we need in the world, until we know the loss of it. When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks like an impossible place to be in, and the direction you are going in seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel. I felt secretly sad. But then, we all have our secret sorrows, the world knows not. We build walls around us, to keep out our secret sadness, and we fail many times. These are the times when people call us cold. Somewhere, I felt that I betrayed my village. I betrayed the silence that had accompanied me all of my childhood. That still rings in my ears. But love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you still love. I knew I still loved my village, my home. A place I could always call mine. I had left my heart there, and my soul had started to wander, the moment I started my journey to come to this new place.Sometimes a wandering feeling leaves you in a state, where you loose your sense of belonging. When a sense of belonging is lost, a riveting account of innocence is lost. The feeling of ineffectualness hovers over you like a disease. Time passes by, and this sense of lost belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities, start speaking to you very personally. They don't let you be accepted, without question. Questions, you never have answers for. How can you live a compassionate existence then, when you find darkness within yourself? How do you live in the midst of such paradox, when you grasp irony in life's unfolding and accept responsibility to live it ? Then you must learn to live in the middle of contradiction, if you wish life does not collapse. There are simply no answers to some questions. You just continue to live them out. Time, a river of passing events, in its strong current, no sooner brings a thing to sight, than it sweeps it away and brings another thing, and promises to sweep this away too.
