A mother’s heart….

In the silence of the night, I feel her…I can almost see the deep brown eyes, slightly slanting at the edges..I think of her often you know, the daughter I never had…

I would have called her Roana. Why?  Because the name sounds cosmopolitan, just like her. In Spanish, it means reddish brown skin. Yes, she would have painted rainbows in different hues in my bland sky.  

Roana has given wings to my clogged emotions...She will strum a guitar..May be my brother will teach her the first string or maybe a stern teacher does...I shall tell her a story with my husky voice...She will listen wide – eyed, protesting, when she realizes that I am narrating an oft-told story…She shall sleep in my arms when bored, or we both shall sleep together in an old wooden arm chair..I will hold her with an arm. Do not worry, even if she falls she shall rise; she has to...

She will play volley ball, unlike her unathletic parents..She can smash the ball so hard that the boys will have difficulty gathering it...She shall smile a little, destroying their ego... She will be an athlete, yes, but she will wear red nail varnish too, like her mother..She will add few sparkles to her nails, or put few drops of blue nail veneer on top of her red toes..

There will be good parties with Roana or bad parties without her, nothing in between. She shall be the life of a party.

She can dance, not well, but in abandon. She has rhythm. She will teach her friends  waltz, foxtrot, tango....Many of her admirers shall want to dance with her in the solitude of large hall in the college auditorium...It will reverberate with her giggles....

Roana should be clumsy with sarees..Curse her mother for the ordeal...But she will make a sincere effort to drape the nine yards well…She will have aesthetic taste…

Roana will find studies interesting..She shall see the Mughal history with her almond-eyes in the monuments before studying..I may be required to produce false medical certificates for her travels...

Oh boys..They will distract my girl..They are like mosquitoes..Just pests.. But she will be responsible...I would have taught her all these...

She will have refined tastes..She will know how much bitterness and sweetness she prefers. She will enjoy the aroma of chocolates, the texture..She will take a single piece or two..she will not gorge on chocolates as a famine stricken Somalian does for food, like her mother did....She has control….She shall enjoy a platter of prawns in a thick, white sauce..But she will not overeat...She knows taking ten pieces does not multiple the pleasure by ten..

She will not go to dingy places like the bar..No, she somehow will not enjoy a mug of chilled beer in a stuffy evening...Instead, she will sit in the terrace and look at the horizon, at the vastness of the sky...It will make her feel small, even make her problems smaller... She will not waste time counting clouds or streetlights..Yes, she may search for a pattern among the clouds..

She may click a photo of the Delhi streetlights covered in a veil of fog by reducing shutter speed and increasing the exposure.. She will tell me that a good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

She can even paint...

She will never see her father smoke..Yes, the brassy cough during night may make her suspect that he possibly smoked once.. She will ask her mother about it, but of course, her mother will deny..Father never smoked..

She will love kites..Her father will gently whisper in her ears, "Look, kites rise against but not with the wind..."..She may not understand, but she will remember...In her despair, when she looks up and sees a solitary kite, she will know what her father meant, and she will rise up with a smile...

She will be arrogant for unfairness; she will stop an owner from whipping his tired horse... She will be arrogant..She deserves to be. But she will be arrogant only in reaction to pride..To the weak, she will build up their confidence, encourage them..

I will marvel at her imperfections, wonder aloud why she does what she did, and get irritated when I cannot find the answer; and yet, I will bask in the perfect love for an imperfect daughter, and she loves me back like she has never loved anyone else...

My reverie is broken by my two naughty sons barging into the room with their “transformers” and metallic cars, squealing at each other and tearing off pages from the beautiful story book that Father recently gave them. I realize with a sigh that life is not about the Pepsi advertisement that goes with the tagline “dil maange more” and God is not it's official sponsor!

P.S. →Wikipedia enlightens me more when it says that Roana is a commune in the province of Vicenza, Veneto, Italy.