Farewell!

It is an image that will haunt me for years to come. A mother pressing her lips to her teenage son’s face, for one last time. Trying to hold him for a fraction more and not let him go, forever. You can almost see her soul, broken and dead. Her quiet, dry eyes create a façade of resilience. Perhaps she is staring at the vacuum, the black hole that has befriended her for life.

This one final look of his face would be one of the last memories of the infinite moments she will inherit from him. There aren’t going to be any new ones. Every time she will return to them to console herself and be torn apart by those very memories like a sharp edged knife. Yet she will come back to remember his beautiful smile, to the time when she had felt him for the first time in his womb, to the night when she had found happiness in his peaceful sleep, to the day when he had conjured up impossible dreams, to the time when he had refused to eat and go hungry in trifle protest, to the apple that she had hidden away for him, to the time when she had imagined him to be frail and weak than his friends, to the time when he was fairer to her than anyone in the world, to his stubborn demands, to his future. And return with nothing but emptiness from those corridors of the past.

I try to empathize, to feel her grief, to make it mine and shudder at the mere thought. What else could I do to solace her? Pray for her, but pray for what? Peace perhaps. Or maybe amnesia.

Sadly there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can bring Showkat back to her. Neither the superpower nation. Nor aazadi.