As she caught sight of her mother’s old dupatta in the junk box, childhood peeped in through flashes of eroded memories.

A faint reminiscence of the cradle covered with the beautiful red to save her from mosquitoes probably.

She, standing next to her mother pretending to pray while the dupatta flew over her face and covered her mother’s head at the same time, adding to her tranquil beauty.

The same dupatta hanging on the nail in the kitchen as her mother toiled hard preparing delicacies to make her happy.

However, with age she lost track of it. Did she not bother enough to notice it?

How is it that the dupatta was silently laying in her junk box in her rented house in Calcutta while her mother lives in their ancestral home in Delhi?

Alone. Both of them.

She opened the folds. The folds of time got unraveled too. There was a tiny hole in it. She remembered now.

Five years ago, when she had gone home her mother had shown her the dupatta. She had asked her if it could be mended. It was her favourite. The same night she fought with her mother for something quite insignificant.

Considered her worthless for something quite insignificant.

Left the next morning and never called back, for something quite insignificant.

Suddenly, she felt a void, a lump in her throat.

“Ma?”

Looking forward to Mother’s Day which is just a few days away, one realizes that we mortals desperately look for special occasions to tell our loved ones that we love them, almost take our mothers for granted and forget the (in)significant sweet nothings of yesterday only to fight with the daily void of not being able to understand ourselves, and thus claiming not to understand others.
This one is dedicated to the unsaid, the beauty of it, and at the same time, the limitation of it. Sometimes it is good to say. Sometimes silence says it all.