The Mother Back Home

By Soham Sen

This tale is of a certain individual from a certain small Indian town in East India. It matters not which town, for the incidents that transpire in this story fall among the common lot, and can be associated with the sophistication of the new generations of ambitious citizens. The name of the individual in question, for the sake of discretion, is presented by the narrator as a Mr. Digby. It should be said at the outset that the happenings in this story, though the consequences of Mr. Digby’s submission into the desires that the youth of his generation so commonly falls prey to, are not unique to his circumstances; no indeed, he is as much a victim of the false charms of learnedness as those around him.

It so happened that our Mr. Digby got the opportunity to move far away from his village, even away from his country, to settle in a faraway land the name of whom the narrator sees fit to not mention, as any foreign land is a land of dreams to the ambitious youth; and coming from the said small town he wished to grab it well, a move hailed by many as folly and by many as a golden sign of progress of his person that nobody else around Digby had achieved. The benefits at the surface of the decision outweighed the perils at the surface and Digby, who lived in the town with his mother, who was growing quite old, left her, his childhood home and the friends and relatives he had behind, and went away to his new destination.

An eager man by nature, it did not take him much time to settle well there, and move further up the ladder of the temporal edifice so many of his generation take to be the board of progress. Soon enough, he had found good work that more than filled his belly and spared enough for him to spend on other worldly trifles as he found worth his leisure. Soon enough, he had managed to find a woman, who, much like himself, hailed from a distant land and had grabbed the ladder of progress too, and married her; soon he was what most of his folks back in the town thought of him as, a man on a pedestal above the ordinary. And all the while his poor mother waited patiently at home, for a mother always awaits the return of her offspring, no matter the distance they put between themselves and her. It should be mentioned that it was difficult for her to live alone, old as she was; she needed the touch of family. Everyday she would spend all alone, and though she was not wanting of company, for there still were many in the neighbourhood who checked in often and sought to look after any needs the poor old woman might have, she was essentially lonely, for all the people in the world cannot fill the absence of a child. Morning to evening would see her going about her daily chores as usual, but most of the day she would sit engrossed in deep thoughts, muttering some prayer that soothed her. Almost anybody who passed by the house throughout the day could see her sitting on the verandah, staring straight ahead, unaware of any eyes on her, muttering something. When somebody visited, she would appear cheerful, and the only hint of the sad loneliness engulfing her would be visible when the others happened to catch her during her solitude.

Meanwhile, Digby was immersed in his new life, seemingly without a care in the world of anything or anyone who might have been in need of him. Rarely did letters from his mother reach him (written by some other caring hand, for his mother, like most old folks, did not have the privilege of literacy), and even rarer were the times when he wrote back. His life before he settled in the new land now seemed to him a distant shore, one he had left far behind. It is not that he did not sense the abandonment he had left his old mother back home to suffer, but that he was indifferent to it, for he took it as a small price to pay for the fulfilment of his ambitions. It would be safe to say that he pretended that it was a far lesser punishment to endure for anyone than it would have been for him if he had abandoned his dreams. And as will be narrated shortly, his indifference climbed such heights as to not let him bother with crises that did not concern himself.

It so happened that his old mother fell ill. And the news spread like fire in the small town, as is the case with small communities; people started visiting, and so did the doctor. But even after many days of the treatment that she could afford, her health did not seem to get any better. Finally her ill health was blamed upon her depressed and solitary existence, and as a feeble human mind could only take so much, much less the mind of an old woman who has not seen the only person she has left to call her own, her son, in a fairly long time, it was no wonder that her condition seemed to worsen than improve. Meanwhile, in a sense of urgency a telephone call was made to her son, by some caring townsperson affluent enough to get hold of one, and her son was informed of the suffering his mother was going through. Now it would be fair to say that he did not feel sorrow or guilt even a tiny bit, for so hard heartedness a character could not be of a human, or so the narrator believes is best put here, but caught up as he was in his daily life of work and leisure, he did not feel it urgent enough to rush back so far away for an illness that probably could be made better by some company and the doctors; so instead he wrote a letter, his first in a long time, believing that a response from him might be enough to put some spirits back in his old mother. The letter took many days to arrive, and while everybody had expected a faster a response, and the attendance of the son in person, owing to the urgency of the crises, which was a bit more serious than Digby would admit to himself, nobody was really surprised when all that came was letter that clearly contained the final word of anything that remained for Digby to say about the matter.

What happened then is very foggy, for even the narrator cannot recount the details of this story to the bones as it turned out. But saying has it that Digby did return home. Sometime after he sent the letter, everything fell very quiet. For many months, possibly even a few years, any correspondence from his mother stopped. At first he thought it to be because his mother was recovering, and some peace and work might serve to take her thoughts off her loneliness and her son. But when quite a considerable time had passed, with no letters or telephone calls, he began to feel a bit uneasy. He tried to not think of what he feared the worst, but the abrupt silence knocked into him a sudden concern and worry regarding the one person he had left behind so far away to suffer alone. It so happened, or so is said, that he finally made the time and effort to come back home. When he arrived, he could feel the change around him: the little town he had left was not exactly the way he had left it. He had been away a long time, he realised, and the intervening years had taken their toll on the place, which was now a bit more modernised. A few cars zoomed past him now when only one or two could be seen on the roads when he had been living there. And suddenly he was struck with the realisation that he had put himself away a long time, long enough that he did not come back home, but to a very different place. All these years he had ignored the place and tried to forget that he had a life here, the town had grown and changed, most of the people he had known were older, but even more than that, somehow the air about the place was different. As if it was familiarly unfamiliar.

Digby made his way home, and it still stood where he had left it all those years ago. A sudden wave of joy and nostalgia washed over him when he saw the house, which was little more than a big block of bricks. And he knew that he had missed it, deny the fact as he would to anyone. But happy as he was to have come back, he was more anxious to see the person he had come home for, his mother. What happened later is still a blurry fact, but it is believed that, as he entered the gates, and into the verandah, even at the appearance of her son in the doorway, a sight she had looked forward to for all those years, he he saw her sitting on the chair, calm and absent, as everyone else had seen her for all those years; her eyes cold and staring blank ahead, her manner without response to the sight before her, and her lips muttering prayers.

By Soham Sen