I wake up and I find I have nothing to do. My mornings are broken. The little things I do for my mother everyday. I look into her room and she isn’t there. I stand in the room with the emptiness which surrounds me. I look at the empty blue pill box which I will not need to refill again.  I look, touch and feel the things which belong to her. I close my eyes hoping that when I open them, I see her again.

The thought strikes me hard that I will never have another cup of tea made from her hands and I will have no one to share the headlines of the newspaper with. She had made sure to make her vote count, the vote for change, against fascists and bulldozers. And she did smile when they lost.

We had our own jokes about just about everything and everyone around us. She had her favourite people, my older cousins Ashraf, Shabir. Yasir, the enfant terrible of the extended family. We laughed at human nature, relationships, religion, broken marriages, second marriages, divorce, bad food, food in the refrigerator, aunts, uncles, dad, money, nephews, cousins and nieces. And ourselves. There is nothing or no one we haven’t laughed at. Nothing was spared. That is gone. Now it’s just nothingness. But every void eventually gets filled, that’s how the universe works. What we choose to fill it with is left partly to us.

There is grief and sometimes the lack of it. I haven’t had the time to grieve. We move from life to death and back to life again. There is no time. There is no space to grieve. Now you have to take care of the nitty-gritty of death. We go through automated rituals to soothe our soul and each other. I was there with her, made her smile with my poor takes on life and people. My partner and my wife, the only endearing person in my life and the best thing to have happened to me was there with my umma, throughout, never skipping a beat and making sure she never skips a meal. The one thing umma made sure is that I found a companion for myself at the right time. My partner walked right in just when both of us needed her. I needed a companion and my mother needed a daughter to take care of her and just be with her. If not for that, it would have been a struggle to find happiness. My mother, Jameela will be remembered  by the legacy she leaves behind.

It’s Fathers Day. It would be impossible not to remember my father in the days after the loss of my mother. I think about it. What an incredible angry man he was. Yet, there were very brief moments he chose to show his love and affection between the endless cups of tea my mother made for him. Life affected him and changed him like anyone else. But I will always remember him as the man who took me to Bond films, showed me The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Mackenna’s mountain of gold. He was my Charles Bronson from Death Wish and Dilip Kumar from Shakti. He bought me Phantom comics and took me to Michael Keaton’s Batman at Symphony theatre. We lived. Life gives us everything it can. Sometimes it’s love, sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes we are the best we can be, sometimes the worst in us comes out. It’s human. We have our flaws. I do. We repair the hurt and bandage it with life and love and we move on. It heals with time. But we always learn to cherish the best memories. And they stay with us forever. Memories that are pocket sized pictures.

I have seen my dad kiss my mother goodbye before leaving for work. I have seen it once in my lifetime. That picture, a brief moment at the top of the stairs in our home in Bangalore stays with me. That fleeting moment of love captured by my mind forever. That one moment out of a billion moments. I take that picture out once in a while and look at it and smile. I wish them love and togetherness for eternity. No one can take that away from me.