The 5th Wednesday Prompt for 2014, I / She looked most beautiful, comes from Shiva Kapoor, whose word graffiti can be found at Where the mind is without fear :)
================================================================
Every time I looked at her, she filled me with awe. She was a very strong lady, and the years of struggle to live hadn’t pulled her heart down, though she had been bestowed with unwelcome physical difficulties.
Yet, she was very determined.
I had always seen her dressed in white. A flowing white sari, carelessly draped over her well-built body, never fastened on the shoulders with a pin , a watch with a golden strap adorning her right hand, a small chain of rudraksha beads around her neck. And an occasional smear of chandanam or vibhuthi on her broad forehead. That was all what she was decked up with.
“Why doesn’t she wear anything colourful, Amma ?”, I once asked my mother when I was very young.
“She’s been like that ever since his death,” my mother replied. “I’ve seen her as a young woman too, she had knee-length hair that she usually tied in a neat braid. She was very beautiful, though she usually wore simple cotton sarees. But ever since he passed away, she’s been like this,” she said, and I saw her eyes were moist.
“She’s beautiful even now, Amma”, I consoled her.
Years passed by, and we lived through many seasons.
As the child in me blossomed into a woman, she was there, troubled by her share of ailments, but always being the undefeated warrior.
She never ceased to amaze me . The radiance of her will power , the life’s stories that she shared with me, and the lessons she tried to instill in my mind, all captivated me no ends.
Sometimes, she told me, that she saw so much of herself in me, which made me proud and thankful to her.
She grew tired as the years whizzed by and as she got admitted in the hospital one morning, we all sensed the inevitable.
I spent time with her, cheerfully talking to her and trying to absorb all the wisdom I could.
At night, my mother sat with her, as she breathed from the oxygen mask that the hospital provided.
One evening, when my mother came to the hospital with dinner and asked me to go home for the night, she was asleep. I wanted to wish her before I left, but it wasn’t proper for me to wake her up.
The next morning, she was gone.
Yes, my grandma left us, just like that, without even a good bye to me, her favourite granddaughter.
Or was I the one who was wrong ? Shouldn’t I have kissed her a good bye the previous evening ? My mistake, isn’t it ?
I went to the hospital to take her home, so that we could send her on the final journey of life.
As they wheeled her out on a stretcher and pushed it inside the ambulance, I looked at the peaceful pallor on her face.
Yet, my tears stayed away.
At home, my mother wasn’t able to talk, she was still trying to assimilate this significant loss ; so the onus of readying her for the final journey fell on me.
I lifted her up slowly, and draped her ever-favourite white sari around her, very carefully, yet as carelessly as she used to do it herself.
I smeared some chandanam on her broad forehead.
My mother joined me ,to have one final look at her, before she went to the land of no-return.
That was when my tears broke the barricades and flowed out in a sudden rush.
She lay there, in a peaceful sleep, as I looked at her through a curtain of tears.
She looked the most beautiful to me, then.
============================================================
Rudraksha - literally ,' Shiva's eyes'; refers to the seeds of an evergreen tree, used as prayer beads in Hinduism.
Chandanam - sacred sandal paste from a temple
Vibhuthi - sacred ash from a temple.
============================================================
