Life comes a Full Circle

Boarding schools, midnight feasts, stealing bull’s eye peppermints from tuck boxes of sworn enemies, pyjama parties, Halloween treats, bullying juniors, making friends smuggle love letters to those ‘cute’ boys, using mirrors to communicate with the boys, filling up slam books, exchanging photographs, packing the trunks, boarding the train & finally off…to an Adult world waiting to be discovered.

And that is when you realize your wings have been clipped even before you could spread them & take off on your maiden flight. You realize you have to get married to someone, handpicked by your family & before you know it…you are a domesticated hen taking care of your brood.
All those sonnet cramming days & Shakespeare’s Othello filled evenings seem to get lost in a new rhythm of changing diapers.
Skills picked up in making neat section cuts of roots & stems in Botany classes are made use of, in cutting vegetables.
All your prize books become the scribbling grounds of the little ones.
All the medals you won in relay races, javelin throws seem to turn into rattles overnight.
All your merit certificates won through sheer hard work become breeding grounds for spiders & mites.
All your ambitions of a career get swamped by wifely duties that leave u breathless.

Days melt into months & months into years & finally it is time for your little ones to fly the nest. After years of keeping them snugly close to your heart, it tears you apart when you let go & yet when they call up & narrate their days in the hostel- smuggling goodies from the Mess & into their rooms, playing pranks on April Fools’ Day, camping on the hostel grounds on winter nights…
Déjà vu….
Its like Life is making you rewind a black & white classic movie in which you are cast & you watch it in slow motion.
There you are-Tip toeing across the dormitory & trying to climb the wrought iron gate of the Hostel on a moonless night, to make it for a long drive along with Him but alas! Your cell phone starts ringing & that’s the end of your escapade for a night…but Wait, yours was not an Era of cell phones… & the realization transports u back to your kitchen, where you are listening to your little one relate how she got caught by the guard.

You smile at Life for trying hard to return back your youthful days that it had robbed you of.
Life seems to come a full circle for you, coz u let your little ones fly with unclipped wings into the azure sky…. unhindered, uninhibited …they soar high above the rest, in pursuit of your unfulfilled dreams that still wait for you to catch on.
It’s like a merry go round ride you got into –long back…and it got stuck halfway up to the sky & took years for you to complete the ride.

PS- This one is for you, mum.....