My Water Bottle

Humans! We come with unique traits, something that sets us apart from the others of our kind. I was in FB chatting with some of my students. Like I always say, when your students who are all grown up still remembers you with a fondness, you feel you have never made a wrong decision about your profession. Well! That would be my side of rebuttal for being in love with my Teaching career.

So, let me go back, I was chatting with two students. Initially both started calling me 'mom'(whoa! did I feel old?lol) and we went into talking about sweet nothings and serious business of life when one of them said,"Madam, I really used to love your water bottles!"

Hey! It pulled some chord in my heart, something that was sleeping in some corners of my brain or heart or where ever but definitely was there. I don't remember much from my childhood and teenage years but since the time I was in NIE I remember having developed excessive thirst for water( thank God it was water and spirit of any kind). Being a day scholar I used to find it tiring to be carrying a bottle of water which would be an eyesore for all of my group friends. "Gachi mo, desert nalay yong yop zumbay?" My friend Sangay would always bark at me whenever she saw me taking a gulp of water from their room. But where ever I went, my water bottle came too.

Then I became a teacher and although my bottle didn't qualify for the role of a teacher, it did follow me to the staff room and to all the classes I went to. In the same school, we had a teacher who had some medical problems which required him to be taking sip of water every now and then. So there were two of us carrying water bottles with us. I heard from students that he was given the name, "water-man!" That is when I developed that fear. I definitely didn't want the name 'water-woman' or whatever related to my precious water bottle.

But since my student reminded me of it, I remembered these small silly incidences I had owing to my water bottle. It was way back in 2008, talk was going on about pay revision for the civil servants. Although all others pretended not to be as thirsty as I was, Whenever I approached they would extend their hands. It wasn;t just my collegues. I remember even my students would ask me water. Now that I think of it, it used to irk me sometimes (not really!). So, I was talking about pay revision. There was one male teacher who always extended his hands whenever I came in his view. So I told him (in jest),"Sir, This small bottle of water is not enough for all of us,when this pay is revised I'm planning to buy a syntex tank and carry water in it."

Well, that was supposed to be an verbal attack on him. But, to my dismay, he turned out be better in verbal wars than me. His answer was, " madam, since you are buying a tank you don't need this bottle, so after the pay revision, please give me this bottle." I could do nothing but hit him with that same bottle.
So many memories, so many people involved and I had discarded all those until this student reminded me. "Madam, when you left your water bottle in the class, we used to steal water and drink," and she laughs. She had her own set of people to remember, her own set of memories, all linked to my water bottle!

(If the readers think I'm talking about one water bottle that I owned from my training days to now, you are mistaken. I had a huge collection. It came in variety of colors and I would try really hard to carry a water bottle matching the color of my dress. Terrible obsessiveness? lol)

My Li'l Bird

Fly away li'l bird, fly away
wings clipped with ailment strong
caged in the bars of false hope
and unseen miracles.

Fly away li'l bird, do fly away
choose your sky
of painless freedom.
Glide in glee
flap in jubilation
get a real life.

Alas! today my li'l bird
has left her cage.
Where she flies,
I know not.

I seek her in the narrow lanes
of the streets she walked.
I listen to soft melodies
songs she connected to.
I caste fleeting glances
in the vast blue sky.

But my li'l bird
now flows with the forceful current
of swollen summer rivers
charred and burnt.

Come back li'l bird
pray come back.
Come back to sing me songs
come back to give me life
for one more time.

(I wrote this in stanzas while tending to my sick mom and ultimately bidding her farewell in the summer rainy river, found this in my phone. Missed her a lot today so I put it here).

Meeting the (Un) Dead

As a usual practice, I would discard the princesses and the princes; witches and enchantress; good versus evil immediately after my kids go to bed after their book ends. I would then pick my own book and immerse myself in the world of grown-ups and their predicaments in my own choice of books. But last night was different; no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t connect to the character Bette from the book I was reading. She got drunk; went crazy in a high couture party and wore brands worth dying for but I didn’t feel like getting in her world at all. (why? Got no explanation!)
I closed my book and put it aside. Lay holding my li’l one’s tiny fingers, feeling her soft breath near my cheek. I peeked further and tousled my other kiddo’s hair as she lay fluttering her eyelids lightly. “She is dreaming!” I said aloud in the dim room.
Still holding my li’l one’s hands I don’t remember when exactly I dozed off. Suddenly I found myself in a room buzzing with activity. There was sea of faces I didn’t recognize. People moving around; talking; smiling; laughing. A lady in navy blue skirt and a shirt two shades lighter caught my attention. “Ama!” I called out. She glanced towards me and came hurriedly carrying a plate. “See, I got you this,” and she handed me the plate with something that always had me licking my fingers.
“Come here, “she pulled me out of the throng of people buzzing around. She took me to a corner, it looked familiar but I didn’t try hard to figure out which room’s corner that was. As we took our seat and I dipped my fingers in that yummy dish for the last stroke, I remembered something I had to ask her. My lips seemed to have a life of its own. “Ama, in those last final days, I remember you casting glances at me and you seemed to have a lot to say. What was that you wanted to say?” I found myself asking her so casually as if death and dying is a temporary matter.
“Ong ni!( she always began her sentences with this). I knew I was dying and I wanted to tell you that I’m dying but I had lost my voice,” she explained. Warms tears gushed out of my eyes. It flooded my cheeks and I woke up with a start to find my pillow wet with fresh tears.
Sadness gripped me. A part of me wanted to go back to sleep and get a chance of meeting my ama once again but part of me ached with sadness that didn’t need a re- run of those pain filled moments. However, soon I again found myself in a room bustling with activity. I craned my neck trying to locate somebody, I didn’t know who. Someone pulled me by the hand. Startled, I found a lady in typical Bhutanese hair cut in mathra kira smiling at me. She was telling me something and I was laughing with her but neither could I hear our conversation nor did I know who that lady was.
“She also went from the same pyre your mother went,” I heard a distant voice reminding me. I saw my eyes widen with amazement as I saw another woman sitting close to us, she looked so familiar but was totally unaware of the woman who sat so comfortably nudging me and making me laugh. “Isn’t that your granddaughter?” I found myself asking the kind lady who looked in the direction I was looking to find a tiny girl with chinky eyes, moving with a toy in her hands. “Isn’t she a darling?” she said, her voice somehow soothed my furiously throbbing heart.
“Your mom and my mom, both passed away on the second,” the voice sounded again. I trembled and woke up once again. “Why did I see these two women who had already left us?” I kept on picturing my own mom and the other mom who in reality was a stranger to me. There was something two of them were trying to tell me but what? I kept on tossing and turning, thinking of the two women and feeling their touch; remembering the way I smiled with them and how comfortable it felt being with them.
Outside a dog cried in a melancholic tone.

Does it mean something?