Too Close to the Edge
Memories of a bleak childhood haunted him ever and anon.
Whenever he thinks of that dark day, a thousand blades cut through him.
Shocked by the ferocity of that memory, his mind still goes insane.
Old wounds are bleeding, as their scabs are scratched.
Born so poor, his family was denied the privilege of even a square meal. His father being a drunkard was a liability and a curse. His mother struggled hard to raise her four children. In his drunken bouts, he used to beat her black and blue. Besides enduring the manhandling of a brute of a husband, she had to run the family, doing all odd jobs. Constantly rubbing rich women’s vessels and floor, her knees and knuckles were in constant wear and tear, giving her severe joint pain.
Feeling too close to the edge of life, she saw, an abysmal void gaping at her.
Still, she persevered and put all her hopes on him, the eldest, the smartest of all her children, who she thought would give her a new lease of life. She seemed to have hoped that one day they would happily settle down as he grew old enough to earn a living.
While his friends roamed and played so free, flamboyant and flaunting, he often had to stand in queue in the hot sun for long hours with his mother for free rations and charity doled out to the poor. She hauled hard to make both ends meet. Fated to trudge the treacherous valley of pain, all night her tears fell like drizzle.
One day when he came back from school, what he saw turned his life upside down…
His mother, dangling on a piece of cloth hung from the rafters of the small house they lived! That moment, he felt broken, so completely broken.
With ripped sheets braided together, she had made a rope to hold her weight
As she choked away dangling too close to the edge of life and death, did she think of her children or her family? As the noose in her neck got tightened, did she regret her action or think of saving her life? …But she couldn’t get out, even if she wanted.
What was her immediate provocation to take her life away? Not sure….!
Like an infant who cries for lack of a better way to say he is hungry, what did she want to convey through her brash act? Through her death?
She too must have been hungry and starving in a world that denied her all love. Trapped in the jungle of life, she must have longed for an escape…!
body was a cage
from it she flew like a bird~
to perch on lands far
It rained that day after they cut her body down and for him, rain has not ceased yet. As memories cascade down, he drowns in bouts of pain and pounds his fists against fate, until they bruise and bleed…!
Copyright ©
Valsa George
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