11 — Old Hag
This was something that was not expected so very well as it came to us that day. It was the night of 12th June 2008, when we were sitting on our balcony, staring at the sunset, and drinking our already cold tea when a mail came to us about his resignation. This was something way too unexpected for us and the way it came made it all the more disheartening. He was a talented boy, why would he do such a thing and that too during a phase of his life when everything was supposed to take a better turn. For better or for worse, our 31-year-old son who was just about to be married had decided to quit his career as a trading broker in one of the most high-end stock markets of the global economy.
Now this was a job both his father and I were immensely proud of, yes we did not express it too well, but deep within our hearts, we knew it was a reflection of how well we had raised our son. Barely did we ever have to guide him towards the direction that we intended for him to reach. He himself took each step to fulfill and satisfy our desire to see him become a self-made man. Now all that we yearned for was for him to get married to a nice girl and if possible settle down along with us for all the remaining years that were left of our life. But here he was standing in front of us, downtrodden and broken, given up on life’s misery, unable to bear or protest against the sorrow that fate seemed to have thrown at him. How could we empathize with him when we would’ve never taken decisions of the same kind as he did. It was a choice too disrespectful for each one of us in this family, be it his father, his sister, or myself.
Nevertheless, we tried to convince him to return back to the job, accrue some more wealth to his name and then retire soon, perhaps a decade earlier than the norm, but no, he had some plans. “What plans?” we would ask, but he never seemed too eager to tell, and kept us at bay with the same old response, “You’ll know when I will”. Now we were too old then to change the direction of our child’s life, so we mutually decided not to interfere much, and instead told our daughter to talk it out with him, advice him for she herself was the wife of a very successful businessman, she must know some good things about how to live a prosperous life. Well yes she didn’t earn such status out of her own accord, but wealth is wealth, it doesn’t matter how you arrive at it.
His sister did talk to him but failed to change his state of mind, for there was no state of mind in the first place. Months passed away and our son remained more or less locked up in his tiny little basement apartment, doing unknown things. I mean what use was it to live off your parent’s property and remain stagnant when there’s a whole life out there that’s calling out to you, waiting for you to exploit whatever remains of it, but our son must have been far too overwhelmed by the difficulties mother nature thrashed him with. My little child, oh my little weak child. Only if he had the endearing strength such as that of his father, he could have passed away his working years with much ease.
But months only turned into years, and our concern only grew more and more. Each day engulfed us with disdain and hate over how our son ate into our retirement years without promising us a better future. He appeared too honest when he said without a sigh that “I will not be able to return your favors with anything more than a deep sense of gratitude.” We would tell him that gratitude is not an acceptable form of compense for breaking into our old age and stripping us of the possible good times we could have spent with our grandchildren, but he neglected our worries. He was always too fixated on something that he kept a secret. Yes, he was with us, but he was with us far too much, which was not an appealing sight to be a witness to. To see your young boy turn into an unappealing middle-aged man is haunting. All of it just mirrors your own fading life. But this was how it was, our slow lives getting consumed by slow decay.
We tried to bury the regrets of giving birth to him by secretly burning his photographs whenever we could, and that was our sole means of leisure. But what about him? What was that thing that kept him all so much busy? Well, we never had a chance to look inside his study, and see for ourselves what our little man was up to, it was too hectic of a task to travel down a fleet of stairs just to catch up with a life so disconnected from ours and so we never made an effort.
Soon over the next few years, my husband passed away, it was devastating for me to lose out on a partner like him especially when there was no one else around to fill his presence. My daughter’s wealth grew too exponentially that in time she divorced her husband and decided to go on a world tour that she financed from her alimony with great ease, not caring one single bit of a mother who was rotting all alone in an isolated home. All that was left for me then was my son, who started meeting me lesser and lesser every day. Old age is not easy to bear, the lonely agitation and constant pestering visuals of a mundane every day can drive one to insanity unless one has someone to talk to. But I was too egoistic to talk to my son who kept rotting in his dirty little basement, I would’ve rather died, but then I thought there would be no harm in visiting him first and then dying later on. I tried to convince myself against it but eventually, I gave in.
It was on 13th June 2008, I visited his basement only to realize that my son had long been dead in his military service during some unknown war in some unknown territory of the world. I often repeat this story to myself, just to stay assured that my life wouldn’t have turned out any better if my son were to live an alternative life where he did the things that we wanted him to do.
