The constant reminder of everything lost
Decades and decades ago, there was one photo frame hung high up on the cream wall, surrounded by souls, breathing and laughing and crying and just living their daily lives. As I grew up, year after year, the photo frames began taking up more space in the house than the living, breathing souls.
I visited my mum a couple of months ago, and I was surprised to see the photo frames of my grandparents and my father and my uncle haphazardly stored in a closed shelf. Dumbfounded, I couldn’t quite make sense of the bare walls anymore.
Months later, it finally hits me. My mum has been living in a house that is largely filled with the memories and never-spoken words of the dead. And who am I to stop her from packing them up - them and their constant gazes and smiling faces that were captured in those frames without knowing that this is how everyone would remember them in the future.
Who am I to stop her from packing them up, them and their constant gazes, so she can at least try to live a life without the constant reminder of everything lost.
- mitalee deshpande, अकथित - untold, unspoken, unsaid