Homecoming

The blue-green bus made its way to the muddy village bus stop and Shaila alighted from the bus.  She took a deep breath to smell the wet air.  It had rained and it was still cloudy when Shaila reached the little hamlet strewn across the hill.

It had taken twelve hours in the rickety bus to reach this village.  The villagers had waited for her arrival.  Her mother, whom she lovingly called Mani, had left the mortal world the previous morning.  The neighbors had informed her and asked her if they should wait for her.

Shaila reached her home, which was about half a kilometre from the bus-stop.  She could feel sympathetic eyes following her.  “This girl’s mother has died”.  Everyone seemed to whisper.

There was a crowd near her house.  No, there was no wailing heard.  In about twenty hours, the initial shock had subsided and the women were sitting calmly.  Few men were standing outside, puffing on local cigars.

She could see all the arrangements made outside her home, to take her mother in the last journey.

Shaila did not feel one among them. They were not her people.  She did not belong to this remote, hilly village which not even a post office would be aware of.  She was from another land.  She was different.

As she entered an unusually quiet room, she could see her Mani lying peacefully, with her hands holding on to her sacred text. A sudden pang of anger took over Shaila. She was angry at her own disability to do anything, she was angry at her Mani’s stubborn decisions, she was angry at everything and she was helpless.  She felt helpless among the strangers around.

What followed was a series of rituals which left her no room to grieve in private.  The village priest arrived with élan and took over the rights to the rites. 

She could sense that the villagers were sorry for her.  Not sorry that she had lost her Mani, but sorry because she was too urban to know any ritual that is usually conducted in the village.

She could see that this time she was allowed to perform all the rites which were supposed to ease her Mani’s passage beyond this world.  She had severed the ties with the village when, after her Babu had died few years back, she was not allowed to perform any ritual since she was a girl.  A girl could not appease the ancestors and bring peace on a household where death had its devastating dance cruelly staged.

She knew very little of the rites performed by the village priest and his aids.  Mani and Babu had sent her to boarding school early in life,  from the hill life, for there was no proper school in the tiny hamlet they called home.  After Babu left, Mani had refused to leave the home although Shaila had time and again urged her ailing mother to join her, for a better health care. But Mani was insistent upon spending her last days at her own place.

Shaila had no regrets for her mother. Mani had a good life. She had been loved by her life partner, respected by the extended family, regarded by the entire village as a woman of great virtue.  She lived her life on her own terms and died in her own style, on the earth chosen by her.

The days that followed, saw Shaila in middle of a perplexed life situation.  By some queer rule, she had to cook her own rice on the wood fire, forego slippers, have bath before sunrise, and wear only the traditional rough cotton cloth. 

But in middle of all these, the neighbors would sometimes, walk in with cooked food, obviously feeling sorry for the urban girl who would have found it so difficult to manage the wood fire.  

At times, some of them would get some hot water for her in the wee hours of the morning, apparently to ease the pain of their village daughter.  

One day the village priest visited her, praised her parents and then advised her to move around the village, visit the people.  While leaving the house, he advised her to wear her slippers since it was the middle of a bad monsoon and she should not be very harsh with herself.

Shaila noticed, these people did so much but spoke so little, seldom did their emotion find words.

During the next few days, as she took few rounds in the village, she noticed that a school had been built in the village and little children walked all the way to the school, in the early morning rain, wearing big polythene sheets over the heads.  Some cycled up the gravelled path.  And the school bustled with laughter. There was life there.  There were new roads coming up and few cemented shops had popped up in the bazaar.  Shaila realized she knew the village so little.  She had left it so long ago.

During the wet evenings, the village women gathered around Shaila to listen to all the stories she brought from the far away town.  Of honking vehicles, pitch black streets, high buildings and rice which had to be bought from store.  The women gathered around a little fire and chatted about her mother, about their common sisterhood, of their own world and of skies they never saw, of paths they never treaded on. 

After few days, the mourning officially came to an end with a festive mood where the villagers invited themselves to Shaila’s house.  There was rice, spicy curries, fish and there was the locally brewed wine.  Shaila laughed to herself, watching them submerge in a festivity.  They submerged and then emerged a smiling lot, her own people.  She felt a sudden ache and a pleasure at the same time, wishing to reach up to them, to each of them. To these people, to her own people.  The mourning had ended.  Life had moved on.

Early next morning, the sun shone softly.  There was dew on the leaves and grass and the sunlight danced with myriad colours, like a child had cried all night and woken up smiling in the morning, after being pampered, loved and cuddled.

It was to be a grand farewell. She locked the house and handed over the key to the neighbor and asked her to use everything she wanted, in the house.  Everyone followed her to the bus stop.  Some gifted her pickles, some packed some raw rice for her so that she could avoid rice bought from the store.  The school children brought her lace-bordered handkerchiefs with her name stitched on them, one handkerchief for each day of the week. 

As the bus arrived, for the first time she heard these people break into a loud wail.  They said it felt as if Mani was leaving again, taking their soul away from them.  The loved her Mani.  Her beautiful Mani.

Shaila boarded the bus.  Few children followed the bus to some distance until the bus conductor shooed them away.

Shaila waved goodbye once again.

She would return.  Return to her own land, to her own people, to the land she belonged.

The Homecoming would happen....