Fate

I was a little girl. Often when the moon tore through the flimsy curtain, I would follow my gaze through that single file of blue light and try to bury the squabbles from the other room where my dad and mom slept. I was too young to even link them to a cat and dog; all I thought whenever I heard their raised voices was nothing;I took it as natural as the moonlight streaming into my room. Before I could even comprehend what a family life is all about, my parents broke the walls of family as they decided to part ways.

Salty tears gushed in silent streams each night as I lay in either of my parent’s house. Snuggling in the warm blankets didn’t shed the coldness that enveloped my heart. Somewhere lurking in my ignorant heart was the knowledge of the incomplete home.

Years stomped on another and many blue lights of the moon did I tear with my steady gaze and empty arrows of grief from my heart. However, I learnt to live life in its normal course. I would take in my share of oxygen needed to stay alive and maybe I even contributed some amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Well, that’s what I remember hearing in my science classes. Two decades of struggling to fit into two different worlds, I sat back in the cold room one dark night.

It was a night like the one I had often handed myself to the slumber hours back in the days when my parents were together. The blue light of the moon wove through the stainless glass, partly lighting the corner in which I pretended to surrender myself to sleep. Maybe, although it was a different shade of blue I found it the same for the two souls who had decided to part ways long ago, now sat together in the other room.

Strange!

It’s a strange world we live in and stranger are the ways of life. Cancer had brought my dying mom and my remorse- filled dad together. On the day my mom freed her soul in the arms of the man who had denounced her long ago I fell into a troubled sleep. I tossed and turned like a kite let loose in the strongest of the wind.

“Why did he leave her then? Why was he back in that odd hour?” Many questions flooded the rivulet in my heart. Met I a soothsayer in my dream. “Let me explain,” he said in a voice so calm and regal that I was compelled to listen to him spellbound.

“In their previous life, your mom was a cat,” he paused. I found my eyes grow wide in recognition of knowledge. My mom never left the area around the hearth, hmmm…. So she was a cat after all. “and your dad was a flea living on her body.” No wonder my dad was all jumpy in whatever he did in life. “Your mom, the cat then lost him when she was scratching herself. He was passed onto a passing dog who passed him onto another dog and to another.” “And to another?” I added, not with a questioning tone but a bass voice that put a big fullstop to the number of felines my father, the poor flea was passed onto. That explained why he never stuck to one woman in his life.

As it was in his previous life, he was tossed from the arms of one woman to another. “Then why did he return to my mom in her last days?” The question slipped from my tongue before I could even arrange it as a thought in my brain. “Well, I’ve the explanation,” he said. “As your father, the flea was travelling on the back of a dog, he happened to pass by the body of your mom, the cat who had been crushed by the wheels of a heavy truck on that road. He had got caught in her fur in that last final breath of her body.

Fate!

I opened my eyes and went to check on my dad who was a silent visitor in my house. He slept with a peaceful look on his face as if he had found the place where he belonged.

I knew my journey to the crematorium had once again been planned.

(An old post I had posted long ago in WAB )