The clock struck 12.
A chunk of night crept towards my window, and sat there keeping vigil. The trees rustled, and the owls broke into a string of hoots. In the neighbouring house, the college students were having a birthday party, singing loudly, their guffaws reaching our house. Come to think of it, they were always partying, dancing and singing away the nights. A neighborhood infant was crying in staccato bursts, reaching a furious peak. Where was the mother? Why wasn’t she picking the baby up? What was keeping her away from the infant?
How can a mother ignore her child’s cry?
Was she a vile mother? A wicked mother? A mother with a devil-may-care attitude?
The wall clock went tick-tock, my heartbeats merging with it to create eerie musical notes, suffixed with the sobbing of the lonely child. A stray whimpered in the cold outside.
It was snowing in Kashmir, and with a pang of severe nostalgia, I recalled the icicles hanging from our roof, dad shoveling snow collected in front of our house, and mom and the other womenfolk, busy replenishing the Kangris.
Jaipur was unusually cold this year, and after a long time, I had dug out my long-forgotten Kashmir woolens, the smell of nostalgia still clinging to them. Ah, the cold season in Kashmir was so full of warmth, when we snuggled into our grannies’ pherans’, listening to their yarns, filching some warmth from their kangris. But that poor infant, I guess was cold. Where was the mother with her warm, loving touch?
The question refused to leave me. It was a brutal, blistering, brittle and bone – chillingly cold world out there. I felt as if I were caught in a blizzard. There were nothing but icicles all around. Icicles hanging from chinar leaves, from birch trees and from the lone pine tree in our ancestral house in Srinagar. It was as if a thousand and one icicles sheathed in a cold brutality were hammering away at my head.
From under the mists of time, a figure emerged. Flailing arms as though trying to shake off the snowflakes, wrinkled face sparkling with a toothless smile. The figure lifted a gnarled hand and caressed me as love- drenched soothing words fell into my ears.
‘Gobro gobro son Gobro’. [Precious child] It was a long forgotten lullaby that my granny used to sing, improvising along the way, adding anything and everyone to the lullaby that came to her mind, or fell in her line of vision. I could only hear the word ‘gobro’ loud and clear.
My eyelids felt heavy and I could feel myself drifting into sleep.
Magic! The toddler miraculously stopped sobbing.
Was my long-gone granny trying to sing me to sleep, or was the lullaby meant for the restless toddler?
The chunk of the night kept sitting at my window sill for some time, till a bloated moon nudged it away.
Through half-closed eyes I now saw the moon smiling indulgently at me.
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