Was at the Doctor's today. Different people, various ailments waited patiently to be heard and cured respectively. As I waited with my mom in a serpentine 'seated' queue, I noticed a pair in a quiet corner. A mother (presumably married early and a young mother hence) and her child. A happy picture of love they sketched. Yet there was an unmistakable tension around her, a repressed anxiety in her body. My guess was some tummy ailment, some eating disorder of the restless baby.
As I tried to suppress a yawn and a debate as my mother lectured and literally bulldozed me with benefits of an early marriage (I have failed on that front per Maa) and motherhood, I deliberately fixed my gaze on that interesting corner and was transfixed for a good 10 minutes (yeah i suffer from short attention span affliction!! again as per my MOM).
She seemed focused and engrossed in the tiny spurts of infant antics. She was happy. She was busy. This time the child decided to turn his face. I was dumbfounded as I saw several remnants of numerous surgeries on that face, the limbs painfully twisted, the skull unusually large than that of any child his age.
The tension had an answer, the anxiety had a subject. She knew twenty odd pairs of eyes were staring at them, their inquisitive fervor burning bright and shameless. Yet she showed no signs of discomfort or agitation.
This time she looked in my direction and smiled. I smiled back. And again a mother left me speechless. This time my mother. "Yes Maa I caught you furtively wipe away those quick tears that appeared on the shores of your eyes."
The duo had excited me. I looked around for the husband, the father. Oh yeah, found him eventually. Sitting cold and aloof at another distant corner, he appeared ashamed and evasive, not even sparing a glance at his 'biological' son. "What was the shame, Mister?", my head yelled in silence (yeah i tend to revolt and question too much. An irritating habit at times).
Bored and agitated, I returned my attention to the happy corner but only intermittently trying not to disturb the togetherness of a mother and a child "a stand alone" pair who did not need any sympathy or miserable words or looks that resembled the former.
The names were called. She, he and the "tag along" "he" left their seats and proceeded to meet the doctor. As they crossed me the child turned to look at me and it was like WHAM. He smiled one of those toothless glorious smiles. The kinds which make women go weak in their knees and tongue and they erupt in profound gibberish baby lingo. The 5 seconds smile reached his eyes (oh those beautiful blue eyes) and went straight into the emotional ledger in my heart (Alas, I am a hopeless prey of emotions. Just no control I have over those crazy emotions).
My doctor is famously known as the "Magician" who has cured the incurable. I am sure several hearts in the clinic must have joined me in my prayers that this child be touched by his magic and join the long list of "miracles" he has performed.
Yet it was the other magician whose image I returned with. She had no fancy academic degree, no worldly wise visions, no massive mounds of money to take her to state of the art medical care centers. To top her rather mundane middle-class struggle was the man she was married to. The BORE - one who paid the bills and thought his work was done here.
She created magic with her quiet resolution, he confidence in her strength of love, her drive to hold onto her child and raise him in all good health and happiness.
They left the clinic. But my faith in strength of human endeavor and spirit was cemented back firmly. Hope hasn't left our kinds, I am sure again.
"Life, you are beautiful even in pain."
