The Graveyard

Cradling the warm porcelain cup between her palms, she placed it on the kitchen platform. Carefully taking out an orange melamine plate, she laid her packet of biscuits and took it out into the verandah. The sky was drenched in a coat of grey hues. Shades of white huddled between the grey. To her, the sky was a stark reflection of the chaos that had been thriving on her pain and abandonment within.  Like the laden monsoon clouds, she was carrying years of betrayal and grief. Her home which once stood there amidst the green grass and pink Bougainvilleas, sheltered by a mighty Banyan was now reduced to a graveyard. A dilapidated graveyard of memories surrounded by coarse brown mud, occasionally thrown against her wrinkled skin every time a wind blew. The plants had withered and so had her will to live.  Sipping on her cold tea, her lips now tasted the salty drops that trickled down her cheeks. Suddenly, she could whiff the aroma of spices that she would painstakingly ground every Sunday with the pestle and mortar that her mother had gifted her on her wedding day. She would toss it into a pan of hot oil, the tang and crackle of which would drive her son and husband out of their rooms into the kitchen. She loved to feed them and prepare the food they liked. Looking at the faded burn scars traced on her skin from the hot oil and the mark from a knife injury, she gave a faint smile. These marks were the only remnants of her kitchen rendezvous. Her love for cooking had slowly faded away like the scars. Oh, how she survived on meager helpings of half-cooked rice and watery legumes now and there was no one who cared to ask. This year precisely marked three years since her husband’s demise and four years since her only son decided to abandon them. Her home was still breathing in the air of the past. Pain, abandonment, despair and loneliness suffocated her lungs and had her gasping for breath.  She used to pull out her wedding album, covered in dust that had settled with time. Flipping through it, her lonely self found solace in nostalgia’s sheath and her husband’s memories. The color that had wilted away from her life, found a sense of belongingness in the black and white photographs. The frames on the wall were no more than tombstones to her. They were mere reminders of everything her life once held.  The marble flooring which now cradled chips of paint that fell from the wall, still held the falls, giggles and the tiny footsteps of her son when she taught him to walk. She had held his tiny fingers as a toddler, later firming the hold when he brushed against the storm of youth only to have it pushed away forever with the brute force of desertion. She sat on the arm-chair rocking gently against the wall, the only sound that interrupted the silence that was living within the confines of her home.  Who said graves were only found in cemeteries, she wondered. Her life was a mound of memories. Night time found her reminiscing, even as the wind outside whispered a soft goodnight to her. The jolt of desertion by her own kin left her a lone traveler on the road of old age. Brushing against the thorns of aching joints and brittle bones, she craved the warmth of a familiar touch over her sore knees. She was starting to lose her graying hair. From long and luscious they were turning coarse and dry. With every passing day, she struggled even harder to fight each moment. She only waited to find solace in eternal sleep, escaping from the reality’s graveyard. Musing and ruminating like every day, she closed her eyes. Rocking on the arm-chair, the cold wind brushed against her wrinkled skin, whispering a goodnight. One last time.