Cheeku
It’s another year and another Holi. Aaj rang hai…Holi is your festival. Not only because you loved Holi but also because it is so much a reminder of your personality-so full of fun and mischief, always wanting to enjoy, but with everyone you loved.
I sit and close my eyes. Sense of time gets blurred. I can sense another time another place. The ‘ghada’ full of ‘thandai’, the little bhang, your asking again and again ‘ma! will this be enough?’. How your friends came and played Holi and how you made them all drink thandai! Deepu Bana asking, what was in the thandai and he being informed-only a bit of cannabis! He didn’t realize cannabis was bhang and felt elated at drinking something ‘foreign’ and exotic! Then that year when you took my friend Mimi from Geneva back to her hotel in your jeep and Deepu Bana told her that the bull on the road was ‘cow-that-does-not-give-milk’ leaving the poor girl completely flummoxed!
I have so many of your pictures in which you are in Holi colours, so excited about everything around you. I remember so well when as a small kid with your small hands you would join Tubby in being the first to put colour on my face on Holi. I would have to squat down so you could reach up to me. As you grew taller and I more proud of my wonderful sons led by the elder one, each year I had to bend down less and less till you grew taller than me and I had to reach up to put colour on you. Now you have grown so tall, Cheeku, that when I reach up to touch your face, the sun blinds my eyes and I can’t see you…
You know I have a complaint to make? Cheeku when you went on your journey of the galaxy, you stole all the colours of the universe and took them with you. I have no colours left even for the Holi and Tubby is not here with me either to restore some of them…
I love you and miss you every moment
Dad