Every time it’s holidays and it’s time to go back home, I suddenly don’t want to.
This, after all the empty half hours I spent traveling in the metros thinking about Maa, scrolling through pictures of old albums, I click on my phone and store under folders named ‘memories’. Without fail, if I loose a phone, I re-take these pictures and create another duplicate folder, because if I don’t save these in my digital archives I might loose this part of my past (because real things are transient, aren’t they?)
It’s funny, because I keep loosing my phones, while this album has remained with me ever since I left home for college, years back. No matter how great the pixel count of my camera, none of them clear the blur of all the years that eventually fade old photographs.
It’s an uncomfortable thought being home.
It’s uncomfortable because not all of us have the strength to watch Maa waiting outside the airport, behind the iron bars that are always warm to touch with the tightly gripped hands of a waiting crowd. It’s easy to tell the faces of ‘The Waiting’ from the cab drivers just by looking at their hands. The Waiting don’t stand still, always trying to move around anxiously, or smile temporarily, trying to make it through the time that stands still- moving fingers furiously, but secretly, in thin space, looking to hold on to something to glide through the eternity that they know will pass as soon as the waiting ends. O the magic familiar faces can do.
Every time I watch her waiting from afar I can see how she occupies lesser space around her while she stands behind the bars, holding on to the railing with an unflinching determination of not letting anyone cut through her in the crowd and take her front-of-the-railing view away from her.
My Mom seems to take lesser space but smiles a little more widely every time, with more wrinkles on her face than I counted last time. And I don’t even remember the numbers anymore because they don’t really matter. When you see an aging face you can tell. We always can.
She hugs me with a little more conviction and a little less strength, and I look a little more tall under her flailing figure and watch her fail to wrap her arms around me from point to point. She now leaves a little more gap between the area on my back that now remains untouched, unlike ten summers back, when she would throw me in the air and sing songs about storms taking me away with their wind, and catch me in between her strong arms before my hit my head hit the ground. Sometimes I did hit my head, but it was okay.
So I no longer feel safe anymore when she hugs because there is always space for me to slip out from, and I make full use. I slip out easily on Sunday nights to go back to the call of the city where my friends and work await.
I leave Maa at home this time, not letting her come to the airport and stand behind the bold banisters of the airport that remain mostly empty on Sunday nights because The Waiting disappear. They disappear because waiting feels purposeful only when we’re waiting for something to come, and Sunday nights are flights that mostly take people away.
