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                                              WONDER
She wondered.
It is the deep afternoon.Shaan was crouched over his lap top.His two hands  moved  haltingly over the key board the clawed fingers remaining  motionless and raised a little  over the keyboard.She  could see his eyes widen up while looking at  the screen intently.Suddenly he moved and seeing her  standing there in the door way of his room he   pressed some   key and with annoyance grudged her  being there. With a flutter in her heart  she told him that she  wanted to see him since he hardly showed him-self up with the rest of his family.She told him she knew that he was very busy with his exam preparations but then  she felt like coming to his room. He banged his lap top shut and shouted at her “this is your problem mama.You will never leave me alone.And I know what your intentions are? Prying  prying  all the time”.She  fell silent ,looked at him and quietly left the room.She  could hear the door close which generally he kept closed only sometimes being oblivious or thinking she would not intrude..But being a mother she  sometimes dared.
Slowly the deep afternoon descended into the  dusk.The stillness in the air seemed to have subsumed  the regular sounds happening around.Gradually the children came out to play in the near- by park..She put on the lights and thought of preparing some tea .She was a very meticulous and frugal lady.She never remembered having asked her husband for this or that.She managed with the little she had or may be  she felt too lazy or disinterested in asking for replenishment of any sort.She could cobble up dishes sometimes out of nothing.The tail ends of carrot the bits of greens with onion and tomato  and the dish was ready.She was gross at picking up recipes   and neither too keen to go and buy the ingredients.Neither she expected admiration or adulation over her cooking expertise.Cooking was for her like any other domestic chore like dish washing  mopping the  floor or washing clothes.And then she had also experienced the same poker face of her husband even when she tried to serve him some painstakingly prepared dish. ..It was only when her son was  young that she got the thrill of cooking because her son was extremely responsive to her dishes.His eyes would brighten up with the morsel  she fed him  and she would come to know that the dish tasted good .But now this too eluded her because she had  come to know later that he hardly ate what she packed him in the tiffin and used to empty it in the school trash bin and go for the fast food in the street.  Now  her dull brain went into the relaxed state which facilitated her to open up in the realms of fantasy away from the  mundane.  
So this was the ploy,  the escape route.An imperceptible maneuvering of a clever brain.To soar in the cosmic blue aura surrounded by the soft woolly chunks of milky clouds and have the last laugh at the toiling minions .To her they resembled the jigsaw pieces trying to fall into places.She could see the scrawny hand manipulating them.They brushed past the beautifully blossoming trees halting a little to throw some empty mineral water bottle or some to spit out panpeek in the shady nook of the trees pulling up the window of their spotless super  model cars.She could see the shiver in the jingling leaves of the trees.Though they were all laden with their totems of aristocracy the polythene bags the plastic bits  the solid palpable dust  on the withered wounded leaves raised by their heavy duty vehicles which zoom past with high speed crushing the badly mauled roads.
She was waiting for  her son to come down from his room but there seemed to be no signs of it.Calling him out would further annoy him.Missed call from her mobile phone seemed to be the best option.It would also give him the freedom and choice whether to respond or not and she too could  escape a  bad scene.
She could see her small child cocooned in the ever increasing mesh of the jigsaw puzzle where the goblins take hold and the azure skies recede to horizons which get revealed only when the hoary heads are bogged down in the din and clatter of their virtual worlds and are inextricable.
Her tea had simmered.She breathed in the aroma pricking her ears for the steps of her son.


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