Aama

Its seven thirty in the morning and I’m coming back after seeing my brother off at the train station. He’s going home to Darjeeling. I haven’t been home for two whole years now. The last time I went I had more than 102 degrees temperature, my lips were chapped as dry as the Sahara and the doctors had declared that it was a case of dengue. In such a crisis as this there was just one thing that would work better than all the medicine pills in the world put together-my mother's home food. By the time I came back to Delhi two weeks later she'd fattened me up real good. 

 On the bus ride back home I sat next to the window, as I usually do when I take a bus, and staring out at nothing in particular when I was awakened out of my reverie by a plump left arm. The arm was trying to slide the glass shut and trying to stop the chill morning air, the face numbing effect of which I was pleasantly enjoying till then. This really irritated me so I turned around with an expression angry enough to make anyone cower. But I stopped midway when I saw that the hand belonged to a middle-aged woman. There was something just so motherly about her. She felt like a mother, she smelt like a mother and her skin was soft and warm like a mother's. I started observing her from the corner of my eyes, noticing her conch shell bangles, the bindi on her forehead.

When she put her hand inside her purse to fish out something, all the memories came flooding back. Every day as soon as my mom reached home from her work the first thing I would do was grab her purse and fish through it looking for the item of the day. Every day it would be something different. Sometimes samosas or cream rolls other times rum balls or pastries. Every Sunday she would make us a special dish. aloo-puri, momo; whatever we wanted. It was a tradition she had started from the time she got her first salary.

And I always had to use her comb although this used to annoy her to her wit's end.

When I reached home from the railway station I sobbed like a child. And my mommy's warm bosom that had consoled me as a child every time I fell and scraped my knees was missing. And I’m missing her today a little more than I do every day.