Time.

There is a rush of life in the house.

Ammi is making breakfast, Abbu is getting ready for office. He is humming an old Rafi tune. One of the things noone will never know about him is that he actually sings quite well. His personality is too reserved to allow an artistic expression in front of anyone.

 Sisters are having a dispute over a shared sweater, brother is blasting "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne on his speakers, the milk man is ringing the door bell, somebody is rushing to the kitchen to collect the pot for the milk because he always leaves too early otherwise, there is so much going on, and I am existing on the periphery of the situation as usual. I go to Ammi and eat my breakfast silently. She always pays attention to the closest details. She has remembered that I like the yolk hard. Another special thing about Ammi is that while the moms of my friends don't listen to them if they don't want to go to school, Ammi lets me take a day off once in a while. I ask her if I could not go and she lets me. I am excited to spend the whole day in her shadow and in the quiet of the house.

  When everybody leaves, I go to all the places which are usually occupied by someone and sit in them one by one. I am getting all the special treatment and I'm loving it. Fast forward to 20 years later. 

  Everybody has a new life now. Parents are here and the children inhabit another corner of the world. Their access to each other might be the envy of a 16th century sailor, but for the people who share bread, butter, blood and tears for decades, how can it ever remotely feel enough? 

 Everything else is mostly the same. The milk man comes to the door, someone collects the clothes from the washing machine and hangs them on the line. There is no distribution of chores about who will collect the clothes from the line and who will bring the dishes from the kitchen. There are no arguments. There is a silence which has replaced fights, but also laughter.

  I sit on the stairs of the verandah, and think about life. I can still feel the peace and the quiet that I used to feel on the special day off. But there is a hint of sadness imbued in this experience.  I think about how everyone has started their own sub culture with their own families now. New life buds out and makes its way, pushing the elderly to the fringes. It is happening and one day It will happen to you and me as well.

  I look at the wrinkled faces of the old people and see so much beauty in them. They have seen so much of this world more than us. They are there..your parents and mine. They exist with their stories to tell, they exist with their pain to express and their love to bestow. All of that is special, but it does not have a monetary value or tag on it that the world can recognize. It depends on us to recognise what we mean to each other.

  It is often said that the one who is left behind knows the true grief because he is surrounded by the markers of the other persons' presence. I can vouch for that  in the haunting silence of the house. 

 When your parents narrate their life experience as if they have already lived their life in the past and are now just existing,  it is not easy to bear. But only by facing this discomfort, can you fight it or find a way aroud it.

I fight against it all the time. I tell Ammi Abbu, i know you feel you have lived your life but what are you talking about,  we are yet to see the world.

  I have to take them on the Bosphorous cruise, where they can see Asia and Europe on two sides of the same ship. We will have the Turkish olives and tea. And Ammi will buy anything she puts her hands on in the Souq.

   

You see, when I give an old patient a medication in my clinic, I can see it in their disinterested demeanor that it is just a pill I am giving them and not the will to live. 

 That will always be given by the purpose, or the feeling that they have something left to live for. 

If you want to stand in the way of a loved one their decline. Plant a dream. Plant a vision. Plant a hope. That is the stuff of life.

When the verandah becomes a place where we will take an exciting flight together from, it doesn't look that sad anymore.