Wildflower---A Story---

It has been raining since morning. The way it rains in the hills. I have been born and brought up here; even then, the way the drops of water slide down lively green leaves brightens my eyes.

Today, early in the morning when I was asleep, Sony left. Grandma tells me, she couldn’t afford to see my face. She couldn’t have been able to see me, helpless, this way, when she was going away for ever. Daddy says she is away just for two years, to get her Masters done. And after that, we would have her back; things would be like before, four of us, Sony, Daddy, Grandma, and me of course.

But no one comes back from the land of immense opportunity, does she?

Sony only charmed her teachers; by the way she studied, all through school and college. I had seen her burning the midnight oil, night after night. She always wanted to make it big. As big as Daddy did. She switched her timings efficiently enough to spend time drooling over books in the library, to reading bed time stories to her perennially ill younger sibling, that’s me. The swiftness with which she ran about in the house amazed me. The amazing bounds to which her beauty grew and the first day she brought Sisir home, to show him to me and Granny, I remember everything.

I never saw school after sixth grade, though. Even being taken out for a stroll in the garden was life at its best for me. My thoughts never crossed the boundary that cut off our house from the rest of the world. The world that would never belong to me. The one in which I would never be able to walk without the help of a Granny.

Due to the accident in which I had lost a mother and a leg, feeling the wet grass shy away under my feet, had become an unrealistic daydream. Strolling in and about the vast backyard of ours with my mother was some age of my life; I could never go back to. I wasn’t easy to convince myself, that I would never have anyone like Sisir walking straight into my life.

Initially, for a few months after the accident they had arranged a tutor for me, Daddy didn’t want me to stay an illiterate. But I overheard them talking in the study, Daddy and Teacher. The teacher coaxed my father to understand that my mind was hurt more than my body. The shock I had earned out of losing mother had numbed all my senses. And so I would never be able to study. I wanted to kill him that moment. But I knew, it was all true.

I would look at the oaks stand tall near my window pane. Its hands reaching heaven. Birds defying margins. The horns of the vehicles, that hardly ever penetrated the jungles around our home, always called me. To roam around in the city, like people do. But you know, I am such a problem for my folks, seating me in a car needs a sturdy person. Granny can’t do it anymore. I have seen her grow older day after day. And she has seen me become more and more dependant, vulnerable and helpless.

Oh god in the heavens, I know you exist. Take me out of this world, my world, your world. Give me a hand, take me into the light. Let me touch the seamless brightness that is there, somewhere a little beyond my limitations. Lend me one chance to dance in the pouring rain. One chance to walk talking to the green mountains, singing to the trees as if I were one amongst them. Climb up to the roof on my own, and talk to my dead mother, who is one among the stars…

Lend me one life, without my wheelchair…