“Suni, I got a call from Sawanpur,” said Kunal one day.
“They found Komal?” she asked eyes brimming with hope.
“No Suni, They asked if we would volunteer to help
rehabilitate the villagers. Being a doctor, I couldn’t refuse. Would you like
to come with me?”
“Of course, maybe we can search for Komal again.”
He didn’t know what to tell her. A mother’s heart could never accept that her child was no more.
********
They reached Sawanpur by the army helicopters as the roads
had been completely washed away.Temporary tents had been erected at various
places .They had been devastated to see how flat the whole place looked. No
sign of the hotel they had lived in.
There was nothing in that place. It seemed like there was never anything in that place. Sunita’s
eyes welled up again thinking about Komal. She could not bear to think how the
heavy walls must have weighed themselves on her child’s delicate body.
She walked to the ground, sat on it and cried for some more
time. She knew she had to accept that she had lost Komal forever. Maybe, acceptance
would give her some closure. The hotel was above a small hillock and she saw
some flowers growing by the slopes. She gathered herself and walked to the
edge, to pluck some flowers and lay it on the place where she had lost her
daughter. That's was the only goodbye she could afford to give her child.
Eyes still blurred with tears, she knelt to pluck the flowers. That was when she noticed a small shanty down the hillock. A woman was trying to light a stove made of wood while a
little girl played nearby. She stood watching the child, as if it were her own. She couldn’t see their faces
clearly as it was several feet down. But she could still feel the mother-child
bond that she saw between them. She watched the mother feed and then lull her
child to sleep.
As she walked back to their tent, she could not stop
thinking about them. Each day after Kunal left for the medical camp, she would
unwittingly find herself being carried to the hillock to see the duo. Every
day, the little girl would chop some wood from the nearby shrubs using a small
pickaxe and bundle it in a neat pile.
She was amazed at the precision with which the girl chopped the wood, sorted out the dry and wet ones and bundled it neatly. There was a rhythm to the chopping; it almost felt like a song. She also wondered what kind of woman would let a child handle a pickaxe by herself.
She, for one, had never let Komal even touch the kitchen knife. But, C’est la vie, she told herself,….such was life!
Then she would carry it over her head and
bring it to her mother. Her mother would use it to cook food, while the little
girl tottered around carrying pots of water from a stream nearby.
“What a difficult life
for a 6 year old,” she thought. Her child had never had the need to as much
as lift a finger. She would happily dote around Komal all day long, attending
to her every need.
The mother would then lead her child to the stream and give
her a bath. The child seemed to like splashing around in the water.
Sunita smiled. Komal had loved splashing in the water too. She would break into an impromptu dance in the tub, splashing water everywhere!
Then she would feed the child ever so lovingly. The child would always eat in silence.
Komal had been quite the prankster. To get her to eat a morsel of food had been so difficult. She would jump all around the place, refusing to open her mouth till Sunita told her a story.
And then the mother would pat the child to sleep. Perhaps she sang her a song, her pats felt rhythmic.
Komal had loved the lullabies that Sunita sang for her. Her favorite had been a Krishna-Yashodha song that she would ask to be sung everyday.
This girl was so much
like Komal. But maybe all little girls
were like that, she told herself, not wanting to get emotionally attached.
