Tick tock tick…....as the clock’s hand budged alongside its elliptical fringe my heart throbbed at an accelerated pace, fuelled by anxiety. With departure of each fleeting second the hour of embarrassment was arriving nearer and closer. Silently, like a ghost, its shadow looming over me, from the depths of uncertainty, larger and clearer. In fact I already felt embarrassed like a shy lamb, but only in private. In a little while a recently earned dignity would be thrashed publicly by ignominy, and shame will infiltrate inside through the bruises. And worse….entire school will witness that.
The disgrace will not be an ephemeral one ……..Poorer.……. it will be tagged on and echoed in my ears for quite some time to trail, voiced by the co-victims of my sloppy attitude towards this particular failed responsibility. The same soft ears that occasionally my mother uses to pinch and seek my instant shriek to confirm the righteous virtue of her son’s soul …….irritating me at times, she entertains just one of her many superstitious fantasies. I doubt her reaction if someday I don’t shriek. Returning back to the ears, the ears those, at the moment, were tense, tepid and taut like a pink question mark, bulging out on either side of a head. A head that was intimately clasping a mind…… or rather say minds….. shattered into anxious pieces by jagged unnerved thoughts…. How will I face it?... Oh! that geek, she will enjoy all of it…. And that bloody wing legged traitor I will…..If I could avoid it anyhow… Could I? The answer was an inevitable NO.
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Reaching home with an appetite pulverized with fury and shame, I did not cared to bother mother for lunch and went straight into my room, without her even knowing that I was home. And by the time she realized my arrival I was deep asleep, almost dead to her any request to eat, and so she didn’t. She knew me well and guessed the probable reasons.
She almost always was right in reading me, as if I was an open book to her and she could anytime look in my thoughts through the pages. Whenever I marveled upon her magical power of so implicitly reading me she had a set reply......“Being a mother I can”. Was this power special to her or is it so with all mothers? And if it is so why aren’t fathers too that understanding? And if they are, why I was not blessed with a father like that? Though there are no plausible answers to such questions yet my contemplation consoles me by believing that I am no unfortunate and only mothers have exclusive natural rights over this miraculous power. As if though immediately after birth the umbilical cord joining child with mother is physically detached but still - an umbilicus less- wireless connection exists between them, unlimited lifetime power, but sadly only one way.
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