You will always live in my thoughts.

My grandmother and dads little brother shifted from Kerala, left the only home they had known, their relatives and friends to come and live with us here in Bombay. It was way back in the seventies, after the sudden demise of dad which had all our lives come crashing down.

Uncle was just getting out of school, being way younger than dad. He had lost his father and brother in a span of three years. First few years, here, he must have spent training himself for a job, because I recollect he used to be home a lot. After amma left for work, grandma and uncle would take turns doing my hair to school ( I had just begun schooling). The day uncle did it, I had a bad time in school, trying to pull out strands of hair which were tied in too tight and were hurting me. Most of the evenings he would come to collect me back too, singing malayalam songs loud loudly all the way back home, embarrassing the hell out of me. I would poke and pinch and get him to stop somehow. But there was never a guarantee, he would suddenly start off again..crooning to the open skies.

As days passed and he got working, I remember I would sit up late into the night waiting for him. I wouldnt eat till he was back and when he'd see me waiting in the balcony, eyes on the road... he would haul me up and call me paaru and tell everyone proudly that I was his daughter, though he himself was almost only a boy then. It wasnt always smooth-sailing in our family but we were all bound together very strongly in our pain, anxieties and our small small joys. When there were family tiffs I would take uncle's and grandma's side, angering poor amma.

Time passed and life moved on. Uncle married, had kids and they were all doing well in life when he began showing signs of dementia. A couple of years ago, my uncle passed away at the young age of fifty-six. The few times I met him, he being back in kerala by then, his deteriorating state of memory and ultimately his ailing body was, way beyond I could bear ( dont even want to go into what his family must have gone through). I went to pay my respects while he was breathing his last. Helpless and torn inside by the love I felt, I simply sat besides him and watched him lying in a state of coma, struggling with his breath. Maybe because I left before he passed away, even though it will be 5 years this september, I still feel he is back in kerala, in our old, warm house, singing out loud, calling out to me the way he always did..Paaruuu..