This Brotherly Love

Today was a lovely day. I finally got to take my boys, the MIM, my MIL, Maa-Janani and the Bro out for lunch to a cafe that I'd been wanting to for quite a while now. Beautiful day, beautiful place, beautiful people. My people.

Rain clouds in the sky. Drizzle and green. The start of Rath Yatra too. Such a perfect day.

Then the EO does something that makes me unhappy and terribly sad. I don't tell, but I don't mince words in telling him about my disappointment. And I cry. All this in the car as the boys, the MIM and I are going to a friend's temple to pull the Rath. To make matters worse, the EO has a history test tomorrow and he fumbled miserably while answering my questions.

We come back home. My pressure has plummeted. I somehow help the YO get his stuff together for school the next day and then lie down. The EO sits down for a relatively late night of studying. At bedtime, the YO comes and lies down next to me since his brother is studying in their room. 

It's dark. My phone goes 'zing'. There's a message. As I read it, the light from my phone spills onto my little son, who is lying on his back, his eyes closed, his hands folded in prayer. "What are you doing?" I ask.

"I'm praying to God so that dada does well in his test."

I added my little prayer to his. God, please protect their love for each other. 

Home Sweet Home

After a four-days-and-three-nights stay in Bombay, I came home to my boys on Friday. They were there, at the airport, all three of them -- the MIM, the EO and the YO. Breathless with excitement to see me. I saw them as I pushed my trolley over to the conveyor belt where our baggage was being off-loaded; my little one sitting in his father's shoulders...

I hurried to get my luggage so that I could hurry in back to them. Having caught a glimpse if me, my YO was extremely impatient. Standing next to him, bobbing up-and-down with excitement, my EO. The moment they saw me walk out the gates, they ran over to me, the little one through a maze if legs which he deftly manoeuvred as if on a football field. He threw himself into my arms and I picked him up and held him close while the EO wrapped his arms around me. We stood in this huddle of love, a mother and her two sons, on the middle of the airport exit path, with weary travellers passing us by in their urgency to get home or to a hotel, not caring a whit about what anyone thought. 

Heaven, for me, is without a doubt, in my sons' arms, where the love I feel is purer than mountain air.

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A friend of the MIM's sent him some old snaps if ours, taken in Bombay just before we got married. We showed them to the boys and this is what the EO had to say:

"In this photograph, Baba makes Hrithik Roshan look like dung and Mamma makes Angelina Jolie look like pee!"

I'm gonna try and remember this every time I look in the mirror.