By Zohra Javed
I just cannot get her out of my mind. That sweet little girl.
How old must she be…?
Two…three…not more in any case.
Very fair, shoulder-length curly golden hair, but rather unkempt and disorganised. She was dressed in a pink top and jeans.
It was a usual evening at Joggers Park. The place was full of people taking their routine rounds of evening walk, children playing about going up and down the slides, and some smaller ones watching ducks swimming gracefully in the little pond. The sea shimmered as the setting sun, all of glorious orange, cast its glow in that unending mass of water, while the crows kept flying to and from it with their catch of “seafood”!!!
She was the only lonely child out there I think. And precisely therefore I could not take my eyes off her. She was accompanied by a neat shalwar-kameez clad woman in her twenties, whose well-oiled hair was tied in a thick black plait, eyes kajal-ed, she was toying with a mobile phone. Plenty of green bangles jingling away as she gestured with her hands while talking to a young man standing near her.
She was undoubtedly the ayah.
Whoever was the young man should have been none of my concerns.
But it seems my traditional narrow-mindedness had taken over too soon as the thought of these two having an affair crossed my mind!
Even if they were not having one, the manner in which they were neglecting the child irritated me.
Two mothers with their new-borns in a relief camp in Assam in 2008. [TCN Photo]
I saw the little one tugging at her ayah’s dupatta with whatever force her small hands could muster and gesturing lovingly to sit next to her. But the ayah was so thoughtlessly unmindful. She did not as much as even look at the lovely little girl.
Although quite inadvertently, I was now looking hard at them. The ayah I’m sure had a strong sixth sense. Suddenly she looked at me in the eyes. I took her stare blandly.
For a moment she seemed to flinch.
Then she hurriedly shifted her gaze to the little girl. And as an after-thought, pressed a few buttons on the cell phone. Giving the handset to the child, she said ” Mummy se baat karo, Baby!”
It was more than apparent that there was no response from the other side.
Either the ayah was faking or the little girl’s mother was too busy to answer the phone. I would never know.
In another diametrically opposite incident, I saw a young female labourer managing to snatch a few minutes from her hard working schedule, to feed her infant and put him to sleep. It may be quite another thing that she had to put the semi-naked child to sleep on a soiled piece of cloth on the pavement near a pile of stinking slush and dirt that had been freshly dug out from the gutter running alongside. The child slept blissfully under a shady tree while the mother went back to work under the open sky, blistering sun beating down mercilessly. Drops of sweat running in a stream down her pale skinny body, but a strange expression of contentment beautifying her simple unadorned face.
Certainly that miserable labourer had never heard of a day called The Mother’s Day.
But surely the Super-Mom of that little Princess I saw at Joggers Park knows all about Mother’s Day.
As a woman, a woman can be good or bad, but as a Mother, a woman is forever goodness personified. However, this Mother’s Day I realised that Mothers too could be classified.
The Poor Mothers who had just one day in the whole year to call their own.
And the Rich Mothers who are Mothers all 365 days of the year…