Book Title: Loss: Essays
Author: Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Number of Pages: 160
ISBN: 978-9353575984
Date Published: Nov. 24, 2020
Price: INR 324
Book Excerpt
Padmini
Pg. 117 – 118
At my bedsit on 12th Street in downtown San Jose, I’d often come back to a voicemail from my mother. But one of them made me feel like I had won the lottery. She had sung my favourite lullaby – Tamey mara dev nadidhailcho. Her breathing was strained but the tune familiar, a voice like warm soup. The lullaby was like an old white plate with a gold rim, chipped, perfect, handed down with love. More than a song, it was as if she had been praying, a cry to the heavens, a personal azaan.
I had just come home after attending a class on media ethics.
On the way, I had stopped to buy a bag of groceries that I had picked up from the local 7-Eleven. As I heard my mother’s singing voice, the grocery bags fell out of my hands and I fell to my knees. In Atonement, Ian McEwan writes the simplest lines:
I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Her singing conveyed this to me.
A grown man sobbing is never a pretty sight. Why did the lullaby touch me so deeply? I promised myself I would save that voicemail. A few months later, my phone went bust and I lost my auditory heirloom, a piece of her soul strained to song. When Esquivel’s protagonist in Like Water for Chocolate, Tita, cries from the womb the tears run down the mother’s cheeks. For me it might be the reverse.
From up above, some of my mother’s tears run down my face.
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Excerpted with permission from Loss: Essays by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Published by HarperCollins.
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