Smriti sat on the cold marble floor, surrounded by piles of clothes, books, letters, files, and an endless silence. This isn’t going to be as easy as I thought, she told herself. It wasn’t going to be easy to sort through rooms full of stuff, discard most of it, and then walk away with a suitcase. Or two. Like they had all done before her – her son and her daughter – they had just packed some stuff and left and one day she had understood that they had left forever. Like a game of make-believe that had turned into dead earnest. They would sometimes come home and pretend that they had never left, but that was just a consolation prize for the parents. Her daughter Shreya would even pull out her old clothes from the bottom of the cupboard, wear them, and go around smelling of naphthalene balls. She came home every winter, sometimes dragging along her husband, and was a good daughter for three weeks. She would eat favourite childhood dishes, visit relatives, make some Indian investments, take her parents to eat out, shop like crazy and at the end of the three weeks, fly back to the foreign land that was now her home. Smriti still used to cry when her daughter went away and Dipankar would make fun of her, saying she would probably want all of them to live together forever under one roof! She would always retaliate that Shreya needn’t have gone away so far… all the way to the U.S…

Their son Gautam didn’t come back home with Shreya’s regularity. Once he didn’t come home for eleven years. When he finally walked through the door one day, Dipankar had warned her that there were to be no reprimands, and no tears. She had not complained, but the tears had flowed. In fact she had even caught Dipankar brush away a tear when he thought no one was looking. Smriti wept easily, something that was always a sore point with Dipankar. She smiled at the thought of how infuriated he would get upon sighting her tears. And as she smiled, she wept too, with the knowledge that there was no one any more. No one catch her weeping, no one to get angry at her, no one to get mad at, no one to share a laugh with, or a thought, a memory perhaps... So should she celebrate the new-found freedom, or should she let the ache within her grow?

It was a strange and eerie loneliness without him. He used to always joke that he would be the first to go, so that she would get a chance to realize how deeply she had loved him, and to miss him. It was a sudden death. One minute he was there, and then he wasn’t, but she didn’t want to think about that now. His death was too recent; she hadn’t learnt yet to deal with it, the way she had learnt to deal with other losses. The children had come down afterwards and now they were gone back. Gautam and Shreya both wanted her to accompany them back, and she had promised to follow soon.  She needed some time to sort things first, she had said. She wasn’t sure what she had to sort out but how could she just walk away, leaving behind the home she and Dipankar had built.

She could have just packed a suitcase and left but suddenly, after Dipankar was gone, she felt an aching need to know exactly who she was. Had it come to this that she could only be defined by the pain she felt? A mother who no longer had anyone to mother over, a wife whose husband was now dead…?  A woman in her sixties who needed to relocate as her husband was dead and her children lived abroad. She thought hard and found no answers, in fact she even found it difficult to think about and understand her life. An ordinary childhood, a college romance, a marriage, kids… she had always been so busy and it had been so easy to just go with the flow, and be content with one’s lot. She was sixty-two now and it was an odd age to be asking herself whether she had never wanted to do anything more with her life, something that ‘she’ wanted to do, she alone. As an individual human being. It was an odd age to feel that perhaps her life had not been of much consequence, that maybe she would like to do it all over again, and differently.

Of course there had been long talks when Shreya was born and a decision taken that she would give up her bank job and stay home till Shreya was older. When Shreya was older, Gautam had come along and after that life had been such a frenzy of activity that she had never paused to ask herself if she wanted to do anything else. She remembered that as a little girl she had wanted to be a road roller driver, later a teacher, then an air hostess… all small ambitions, that had been easy to forget. Yes, there was one that had stayed a little longer. Once, as a teenager, she had wanted to give up everything and joined Mother Theresa… guffaws, arguments and much advice had greeted her decision. No one had really taken her seriously and after a while, even she hadn’t. She wondered if a career would have made her feel that she had done something in life. She had done a lot in life, hadn’t she? So why the emptiness?

With Dipankar gone and the children away, she wondered what she would do with her life. Live with one child, and then another, away from her own home, her own land…? She knew this wasn’t what she wanted, but she didn’t know what she wanted either. It seemed strange to her that Dipankar and she had never discussed about this, about what the survivor would do after one of them was gone. It would have been easier for him, he would have just had to hire a maid… Was that all she was? Could she have been so easy to replace? Perhaps not. In any case, it was she who was left behind.

After days spent listlessly, Smriti finally decided that she would empty the house of all that was redundant. Armed with a purpose, she now sat surrounded by so much stuff, not quite knowing what it was that she would do. With the clothes that Dipankar would no longer need, with the cricket bat that Gautam would never again use, with the bundle of old letters that Shreya would never read, the red wedding saree that she had worn on her wedding day and would never wear again… She looked at the things with an immense fondness, and sadness, knowing that everything here was actually a bit of her life. That if she imbibed everything around her, she could perhaps get a sense of what her life was all about, that it was not all in vain.

The phone rang and she hunted for the cordless amidst the piles. It was Gautam.

Ma, how are you?
I am fine. How are you?
It must be so lonely for you Ma.
It is…but I will get used to it.
Ma, why don’t you come here?
I will, I will, just give me some time.
You’ve been saying that for two years now Ma.
I will come, just you see.
Okay, you let me know when. I’ll come down to fetch you.
Okay. You stay well, eat properly.
I am worried about you Ma.
Don’t worry. I am fine. God bless you Khoka.

She disconnected the phone and shook her head. The childhood name ‘Khoka’ had slipped. She knew Gautam no longer liked being called that.

Khoka, Khoka, Khoka she muttered to herself. A lonely woman, a mad woman, unable to come to terms with the reality of her lonely existence. Is this how she wanted to end her days, she asked herself. Two years had gone by and she was still fumbling with the pieces. As if her life had come to cease as well. Of course she had loved him, and she missed Dipankar every moment of her life, but why was she letting herself go? Suddenly everything fell into place and she was so grateful for this moment of clarity.
It took a little bit of convincing with the sisters at the Missionaries of Charity that this old woman was capable of being a volunteer. In the end, Smriti’s determination won the day, when she explained how she had always wanted to do this, when she argued that a woman her age was immune to suffering but capable of immense compassion… Of course she was wrong… she realized soon enough that she had absolutely no idea, thus far in life, of how deep human suffering actually was. It was impossible to be immune to such pain, but ever bit of it that she helped in easing made her feel grateful that life had given her a chance to do this. She worked all day and when she came home in the evening, she slept a tired sleep. Give till it hurts, a great woman had once said, and Smriti was glad that she had so much to give. All over again.