What a fighter she was!

“You look so pretty after marriage!”, she said holding my hand with a gleam in her eyes. I managed a smile, fighting myself to hold back the tears. “How are you badimummy?” I asked, I knew how she was. Fighting to live everyday, with the strength I’ve only read in legends. What else heroes are made of? And here I was feeling so weak and vulnerable, I wanted to cry my heart out, only I couldn’t. I’ve never felt so naked about my emotions ever.  There were so many thoughts slapping my head that I was almost going insane. How could life be so unfair? How can she smile with so much pain? How.Why. Of course, there are and will be no answers to such questions. She was still holding my hand, moaning with incredible pain, that one can only imagine. “How is S? He’s a really nice guy”, she smiled, I couldn’t hold a conversation and hated myself for acting so childish. Act Normal, Nikita. Hold back the tears, she doesn’t wanna see them! I would remind myself, frustrated. Often, I’d excuse myself with a fake phone call. It was so much harder than I thought, that maddening thick silence engulfing us all. Outside in the waiting room, I wept profusely, people saw, they turned back and saw but I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t care. I couldn’t masquerade strength, I could see myself all over the place, crying like a baby, even in front of my lil sister when I should’ve been there for her. I couldn’t, I was breaking in the most ugly way one can imagine. Some patients were in the corridors, walking, some were in the well lit waiting room and seeing somebody weep like that was probably the last thing a cancer patient wants to see, I failed.Miserably. I went back to her room, we were all trying desperately to strike a normal conversation, cracking silly jokes, pretending to laugh, “Shivi you remember that hindi language essay that you wrote in class 2?”, bhaiya asked Shivi. “It was genius”. She smiled and in a fit uttered, “bhaiya stop it, it wasn’t that bad”. Everybody laughed. Badimummy laughed too, it was a pretty sight. “You guys must be hungry, order food, P”, she asked her son and soon the rice and the noodles arrived. We couldn’t eat, how could we? She hadn’t eaten in 30 days. “You’re not eating, please take some more” she told mom. Amidst so much pain, she could think about all this, I could not believe. How can someone be like that? I was unlearning everything I’ve known about life in these 25 years. You need to shred every strand of your existence to understand death and how much nothing else matters. How everything falls flat in the face of death. I hadn’t seen death from so close and she was living it with so much positivity and courage. We all know death is an inevitable end, but I wasn’t prepared for it. Who is? That day I learnt how much it means to give and to smile and what strength does for us.  When we were leaving, she said, “I’ll soon come to Delhi” but sadly, she never will.  We lost her a week after I relocated to Orissa. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep for days thinking I hate this place  and this is what quitting job is doing to me. I couldn’t write. Until today when I wrote this. I’ll never forget what she taught me in her silence. May her soul rest in peace and inspire us all till the end of our days.