A thousand more moments

Today I was in the kitchen, when I heard loud ‘Raam E Raam’ (s) uttered between frantic sobs… I opened the door to see the gujarati daadi who stays opposite our flat, running nowhere yet running, desperate, howling, in the common area… the moment I opened the door, she ran up to me and said something which didn’t make sense but because her hand pointed towards her flat, I ran in that direction. Her husband lay face down on the floor, blood oozing, broken specs lying close by… My heart raced and then leapt… I lifted him up… he was breathing… I screamed at my househelp… “Bhaiya ko bulao Fatima”… For me if anyone knows how to deal with crisis, it is my thin man…

The thin man was already there opening the freezer, taking out the ice cubes, placing them on dada’s bleeding nose… it took a while for him to settle but at the end the situation was under control… The dada is now of to the doctor’s to get the stitches done.

What stays with me is not the fright of the situation but that of the gujarati dadi’s eyes… the fear in those… of the possibility of losing the man she might have known for may be 50-60 odd years…

In the midst of dealing with life, we assume that we will always have a thousand more moments… but in truth, may be we don’t.