“Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.” ― Robert Browning
The stork visited us with a baby girl upgrading us to a rank further ahead in life. The baby is the first in the family and a cynosure of all eyes. She is as perfect as a picture and a ripple in our regime. While I embraced the baby, I slithered into the role of a grandaunt, and my memories hurled me back to a few decades. This was the time when my niece, the baby’s mother was born. We are three sisters and a brother whose mother left for the heavenly abode in a haste. When my eldest sister decided to stay with us a few more years after her marriage our joy knew no bounds and it accentuated when we came to know that we would soon turn into uncles and aunts. We looked around for help but could not find anyone to substitute my mother’s role during the difficult time and so she was ushered quickly to her in-laws when the baby was due. It also meant that we would have to manage our lives and our studies. Days flew quickly and we fell into a new routine without my elder sister around. Though we missed my sister we carried on with life. We would write to her regularly and speak to her occasionally as those were days with taxing means of communication.
In the month of December, just before the Christmas holidays, we had a fun fest at the college. During the fun fest, I was added to a team of girls who were to conduct Bingo for the visitors. Bingo is commonly known as Tam-bola where numbers are randomly called to declare a winner whose ticket has all the called numbers. My classmates and I took turns and conducted the game with gusto. Money poured in with the guests. The guests to the fun fest were siblings and parents of the students, but there were many men who poured in because it was a women’s college comprising of beautiful teenagers and women. Since the crowd was getting unruly, our class teacher’s husband joined in to stop the unruly mob. We tried to be our best as we wanted to be the class with the highest turnover in the fest with minimum investment. The excitement and the attention of the audience raised our morale during the weariness of the evening. That night when I reached home after all the thrill, I found my father in his best moods, it was as if fortune had smiled upon him. He greeted me by saying,” Jyothi you have become an aunt and I a grandfather”. We laughed together and prayed to God to give my sister and the little one good health.
My niece came home when she was three months old and grew to be my father’s pet. She changed our lives through her laughter and cries. We saw her grow and blossom like the snowdrops. We were there with her during her battles and her birthdays. Perhaps this was the reason why we longed to be with her when she was in labour. When we saw my niece’s little baby for the first time, we could not stop ourselves…it was as if the good old days were back. The baby was frail and pinkish, her round face resembled my niece. Her legs were lanky, her hands held a tight fist to show her annoyance. As we kept calling her numerous names like cherry, cutie pie, baby and so on…my memories were again flung back to a lean human way back in the seventies. He worked for the postal department at Mehdipatnam in Hyderabad. He would deliver letters to all of us in the colony. He was special because he connected us with the world, with our relatives and friends. He used to wear a khaki uniform and a brown hat. He would address everyone one of us in different ways but he called me ‘baby’. As I grew older, I grew taller than him but he never stopped greeted me by the name ‘baby’. There was a cheerful smile that accompanied him throughout. He would fast during the holy months of Ramzan. When the afternoon heat would become unbearable he would take off his hat and rest it on the branch of the green pomegranate tree. He would then trudge to the tap in the garden which was fixed on a staggering lean metallic pipe. He would slowly move the clip clockwise and collect the water in his palms to throw it on his tired face.
The year I was blessed with my son, I stayed the longest at Hyderabad. During my visit, I would hold my little son and walk around on the balcony. I used to see the postman cycle slowly through the lane, the number of letters were fewer but the smile remained. He was old and on the verge of retirement. He would look at me and say, ‘baby is blessed with a baby’.
As I kept looking at the little baby’s face, I found her looking at us in wistful anticipation, after all, she was new to the world. Four elderly faces sent a hostile attitude through the shock of her hair and then there was a loud bawl. We kept looking at her as we tried to console her. Somewhere we had left the most beautiful phase and never knew how years had rolled by……
“It’s easy to grow old if you haven’t grown up” ― John Hively
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