Jharoka

What is time? Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. Time is used to quantify, measure, or compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and even, sequence events.

Today marks exactly four weeks of time since my mother’s passing. Those four weeks can be translated into 29 days, 696 hours, 42,000 minutes and/or 2,520,000 seconds and counting.

There hasn’t been a second that has passed where I haven’t thought about her in the biggest or smallest of ways. I miss our multiple daily conversations, however long or short. I miss hearing her sweet, love filled voice. Her first question would always be “how are the kids?” And one of her last comments to me before our conversation finished would be telling me to make sure I take care of myself. I now watch the clock with a strange anticipation in the morning and evening that I should call her or will see her number accompanied with her picture appear on my phone for one of our conversations. But, nothing.

When I would call her or she would call me, we would often say to the other “I was just about to call you” to which my Mom would say “dil ko dil se raah hoti hai”, meaning “the heart finds its way to another’s heart” or “the soul feels the response of another soul”. No doubt, a connection of souls that cannot be broken by the barriers of the realms in which we now exist.

I now resort to listening to her old voicemail messages to get a dose of her loving voice and filling some of the emptiness of my soul caused by her departure. In every voicemail (and conversation) she would call me “meri jaan”, translated as “my life”. Her passing has taken a part of my life and soul with her.

Jeremy Irons said “We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams”. I definitely have been using my time machine to travel back through countless wonderful memories and look forward to having long enough spurts of sleep to see you in my dreams, Ammi. Come visit me, we have so much to catch up on!

If you have made it to this post / page, I would be most appreciative if you could say a prayer for my beloved mother. Thank you.