When bubbles pop!
My 6-year-old loves to talk. When he is not asking his
father questions, or enlightening me with his thoughts, he is talking to the
toys scattered on the floor. I think, among the three of us, his sister, who is
three and a half years older than him, listens to him most intently. They break
into a fight when she refuses to. When I write, I hear his questions and
sometimes reply without actually listening to the specific query. He stares
back at me, says nothing at first and when I get uncomfortable at a pair of big
black eyes staring at me, I turn to look at him. Having my full attention, he
then rolls his eyes, managing an “Oh boy” before leaving the room. If he’s
silent, then he’s either sleeping or reading his sister’s book on Social
Studies, looking for his next set of questions.
Life would’ve been very kind if my son got a chance to grow
up around my father. My father’s wisdom, kindness, and patience were just what
I needed to keep my son’s insatiable curiosity steeping without scalding. But
the closest they could get was through a photo of my dad sitting atop the
bookshelf at our ancestral home in Kolkata. He calls my dad Somu (nickname for
Somen). It took him a good five years to understand why Somu was there in all
my stories but he only stared from a photo in Kolkata. Death, I told him, was
when someone was not around. People die when they become old. Was Somu
100-year-old? Well….almost, I had answered dishonestly as he wouldn’t
understand that the notoriety of cancer had nothing to do with age. But, I kept
insisting that my father lived on. Through me, and my children, just that we
couldn’t see him. His stories were something I never fell short of and they
were something my children loved to listen to all the time.
Last Monday, my son skipped school as he was under the
weather. Delhi’s air quality had suddenly plummeted after showing us some sunny
days for two weeks straight. He stayed inside all day and then after lunch I
allowed him to sit in the balcony. The sun looked paler than an old dusty CFL
bulb through pollution haze, managing a sheepish smile. We took out a tube of
soap water that we had got from Dilli Haat
long back and started blowing bubbles.
I blew them and he popped them. Some of them popped right on
my face even before they left the loop on the plastic wand. He giggled and kept
popping them. We had bubbles of different sizes. He gave them names- ‘Biggy Bubbles’
and ‘Piddu Bubbles’. Three bubbles were stuck together and he started calling
the trio ’Teddy Bubble’, I couldn’t agree more since the two smaller ones
looked like the ears of a teddy. “Mumma why do these bubbles first appear green
and then yellow and then purple and see that one there?” he was pointing at one
which managed to float way above the others, “that one is red! Why mumma?” I
started explaining but then they all popped and he giggled away. We then paused
and I told him that sunlight has seven colors, and he named them all. As I blew
next into the loop, we had a train of bubbles. He screamed in glee “That’s a
whole family of bubbles!” He started calling them baba bubble, mumma bubble,
sister bubble, me bubble, Tukai (my brother-in-law), Momo (my sister), Rom
bubble (my nephew), and then a bubble popped. He said, “That one is Somu bubble!”
I was rather surprised as to how my father came up in his list of bubble families
out of the blue. I looked up at the bubbles and one by one all the bubbles
started bursting. My son pointed at them and said “They’re all Somu bubbles.” I
was smiling as I knew what he meant. He kept saying, “Mumma, why did Somu
vanish? Did he not love me? Did he not want to meet me?” I sat down and told
him that Somu loved him a lot, it’s just that some people come before us and
then they have to leave before us so Somu did the same and he left the space
for him and his sister to grow. I reminded him that Somu had written poems for
them- which they loved listening to. I was not sure whether I made him sad, as
it is he was quite distressed wiping off his runny nose on his sleeves, I didn’t
want him to cry.
But I was wrong. He came up to me, gave me a hug and said, “Don’t
be sad mumma, do you know what happens when bubbles pop?” I kept looking at him
for the answer. “They become Somu! Let’s blow some more and tell them a hello
before they pop.”
Later I couldn’t help thinking how each one of us had a
different way of interpreting death. For me, my father still lived on, although
I had last hugged him sixteen years ago. For my son, who was born ten years
after my father’s demise, Somu was a kind-hearted man who never scolded or hit
a child but had simply vanished and become invisible before Hutu was born.
