“I want to go London, why can’t you be any other mom?” I cried in a savage, high voice.
Her eyes were drawn, hurt and dark. Mainly hurt.
Agony coursed through my veins like a furious snake as I crashed down with tears burning my cheeks.
My latest demand had been to ask to pay for a trip to London as part of an art appreciation trip organised by the local art community. To my chagrin, Mother objected, as she helpless sigh to my persistent whines. My request for a new phone was already enough to drain her entire year salary. She looked worn, exhausted out by my demands for more and more things to fulfil my insatiable materialistic longings.
The retreated figure cast a lonesome shadow on the wall as sunshine on the wall as the sunshine streamed into my room, lighting it up with a cheerful glow as the heat of the warm evening sun gradually fizzled out, bringing on dusk’s silent company when I threw open my room curtains.
Sullenly brooding over the recent conflict, I continued to mull over how futile my efforts to convert Mother to my way of thinking had been. The generation gulf was simply too wide to close up.
The muffled sob outside my door told me Mother was still standing there, probably reluctant to leave, keeping an ear out for my unreasonable ranting and raving, so I intentionally intensified my yells and lamentations till it rose to an unbearable crescendo of screams.
Memories of Mother’s unconditional love, tolerance and care for me descended like a blanket over my still, cold interior. Despite worrying for our financial problems, love for me had compelled her to pushed on. Taking three jobs in a single day, Mother worked daytime as a taxi driver, attending endless streams of customers at the taxi stations, her afternoons as a cashier serving packs of customers at a small supermarket. At night, she spent long hours working at her sewing machine, sewing clothes for a tailor from the nearby shop.
The wrinkles that lined her once beautiful face divulged her age while her workaholic face reflected the years she had selflessly devoted to make ends meet.
Sometimes, when Mother managed to make the extra for that new mobile phone I requested for, I would be left there alone–winner of the field, enjoying my conqueror’s solitude.
First, I smiled to myself and felt elate; but this fierce pleasure subsided in me as fast as did the accelerated throb of my pulses. A child cannot quarrel with their elders, as I done; cannot give their furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine; without experiencing the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lit health, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I demanded Mother for things that I knew to her cost an arm and a leg. The same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half an hour’s silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of my hated and hating poison.
Something of ferocity I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy–its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
Mustering all the courage that I had, I strolled slowly over to her room, where she was working tirelessly at her sewing machine. The monotonous whirring of the machine intensified the love that she represented, a relentless and sacrificial love that she exhibited in exchange for my turbulent impulse nature.
“Mother?”
“Yes?”
“Forget about the new phone model.”
“Why? You would need it for your projects. Well, I would have enough money after I am done with this batch of blankets.”
“There is no point for you to slave so hard, a person whom I love do not deserve that no matter at what cost. Especially not for a stupid device.”
A look of astonishment stayed on Mother’s face.
Tears gleamed in her eyes as Mother flung her arms around me –an involuntary act of helpless devotion as my words reached the depths of her parched.
So we stood there, as dusk fell silently and enveloped us, locking in an intimately warm embrace of love.
Truly, it was a moment of reconciliation, a time where the music of love resonated deep within our souls, played by an orchestra of motherly love.
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