the storm

Those were the last days of summer just before the winter was to set in. Mom was waiting for dad’s Ford to drive in. Little Vani ran around in the house with the dead tortoise from the aquarium in her pyjamas, something I was waiting for mom to find out. Everything that day seemed to set in an hour early, even the sun. Mom was still standing in the balcony looking at the far end of the round as far as her eyes could take her, the pallu of her faded sari fluttering in the wind.

That night Vani slept with the tortoise in her pocket. Later, mom almost whispered this to me “Veena, the heart has the power to overrule any storm; it also has the power to brew & blend stillness into the storm it conceives with no rhyme but a lot of reasons”

Vani doesn’t remember our father returning that night. She doesn’t remember him at all, now.