Failed Musings

I switched on the O Watt bulb in our room and sat up from a distant dream snapped abruptly by the whining I heard. She was sitting there on her bed with her legs neatly folded under her pillow. She had her elbows on the pillow and her face was cusped in her tender fingers that had played with mine many a time in the past. Her hair fell loose on either side of her cheeks and she was staring at the light blue pillow cover. I got up from my bed and went and sat next to her. Her pillow had a wet drop of her tear. The drop got larger as I looked at it. But my daughter never looked back at me.

“Munna” I waited for her to look at me. She was lost in her realm of I don’t know what. “Munna,” I tried once again. She did not respond. That moment I realized my daughter, sitting near me was far away from me. Far far away where my helplessness was measured in her indifference to the world around. When your dear ones do not respond to your call or sound, you are like a man caught in a whirlpool of emotions. “Munna…Munna” my words were soaked in tears. As if from a fairy tale I had once read to her, she looked up at me with angelic innocence of a three year old. “Munna…Munna…dad’s Munna” I spelt into her ears. She sat there looking at me. My twenty two year old daughter did not care. She was not responding to her father’s words. She was not responding to a business tycoon’s pleas. She was not befitting a board member of our company. She was not in this sphere of existence.

I looked into her eyes. They were the same as I had seen on the day they were born. But the gleam was gone. She looked away as tears traced down her cheeks. I took the towel from the side of her bed and patted her face dry. My daughter coiled into a ball as she tried to lie down. I helped her to lie down and I sat beside her and ran my finger through her hair. She slowly slipped into sleep. I looked at the clock. It was 2.08am. I sat beside her as I did not feel like sleeping. I had volunteered to by-stand her today and send my wife Susan and my elder daughter-in-law Geetu home.

Being the youngest of our children, and the only daughter among three kids, Jessica always had her say. Munna, as we called her was…no, she still is our darling angel whom I can go on telling about for days. She would eagerly wait for me at the airports, at the doorstep and where not, even at the board rooms. She would be the first to jump onto a horse, or into the water, or in the driver’s seat. She loved playing the piano and was my favourite dancer. When she came to India for her studies, I was not worried. I was enjoying the transformation of my princess into her full regality. I don’t know when, but slowly we started losing her. To someone who escaped a father’s radar and trespassed into our happiness.

        Munna broke the news over an ISD call. As I was signing some files in my office room in Germany, she gave me a call. A twenty year old’s whims sounding like she had found heaven, “Dad, I wanna marry Arjun.” My daughter can’t be kidding. “What?” I did not know of any other possible reply and neither had the time to think of one. “Can you hear me? I have met a guy here in Delhi. His name is Arjun. He is from Kerala and we have decided to tie the knot.”

“We mean who?”

“Dad”

“Why were you send to India?”

“Dad”

“You are flying back asap.”

More meaningless words were exchanged. My daughter sounded different. I was not going to lose our daughter to some guy she had met in the inspiring corridors of her college. I had dreams for her. I had planned a life for her. But she had planned one for herself. And we did not know, God had already planned another one.

        As parents, we were invited for our daughter’s wedding. My daughter had her way once again. But Arjun followed her way into our hearts. I was convinced. The choice was not wrong in any sense except for some old hearted people like us who pointed out that they belonged to two different religions. Arjun, aged 21 and Munna too aged 21 was man and wife. They had their scholarships ready for Masters in UK and were ready to fly when Munna with an eight week old foetus was left alone by the suffocating tentacles of faith.

        Well, if you ask me, initially I had wished Arjun would walk away from my daughter’s life. Once in an ugly spat before her marriage, I had shouted, “U r gonna weep. And when u turn, that hell of a guy won’t be there.” But after marriage, he was a part of our family. I had accepted him and wanted them to live happily forever. But the ways of God are strange. Or how would you explain His keen attention to words spoken in rage. Arjun was gone. Gone in a moment of some stranger’s reckless driving in a busy shopping street.

My daughter did not wail. She was lost in a world that failed to give colours to her reveries. At times, she cried like a baby who had not been fed. At other times, like a three year old who had lost her doll. We lost her baby. We lost Arjun. We lost Munna.

The moon strained to look at me through the curtained glasses of this hospital in London. I wanted to get back my daughter. I had all the money in the world. Munna was murmuring something. I listened carefully. “Arjun…Arr…jun…bring him back…back.” All the money I had in my bank accounts could not bring him back. I sat there on the bed like a helpless three year old.