AN ODE TO MY MOTHER--award winner

AN ODE TO MY MOTHER


In nineteen seventy eight,
End of February,
For distant Guatemala,
I left in a hurry.

This was my first trip abroad,
For almost months fifteen.
That she make dinner for me,
My mother was too keen.

I was so busy those days,
I could not visit her
To savour from her own hands
The most lovely dinner.

She asked me many times but
I could not find the time.
I had often felt guilty
For this petulant crime.

Three months later while abroad,
Away from home, in night,
I dreamt she is calling me
In dim, fading twilight.

She was beckoning to me:
Mahesh, my son, come here.
Come and have from my own hands
I have cooked you dinner.

This was but the briefest dream,
I had that night in May.
All about it I forgot
But then, to my dismay,

My wife called from New Delhi,
On the very day next:
‘Mother had a heart attack;
Died despite efforts best’.

I am a doctor myself,
Not given to occult.
But this bizarre incident
Had only one result.

It was to convince me that
In order to get peace,
The spirit of my mother
Flew across seven seas.

It had to fulfill its wish.
Before final goodbye
She came and fed me herself,
Though I failed to comply.


* Written in abcb 7-6-7-6 format
* Awarded place of honourable mention in "Invalid Item" 



* This is a real incident. I left for Guatemala on 28 February 1978 on 15 months post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the United Nations University for advanced studies and research in human nutrition at INCAP [Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama, Instituto Nutricional de Central America y Panama]. My mother had to be hospitalized in emergency for umbilical hernia at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, where I was teaching. She was operated successfully, but collapsed due to sudden massive heart attack on the seventh post-operative day, in the arms of my father while my wife, a doctor herself, was briefly away. Now both of them, too, are gone. The incident described here is a prrof that there is something to spirit and telepathy which modern science has yet to unfathom.

My wife, too, died in my arms on a hospital bed in 1996. I wrote the following in her memory:
MY WIFE, MY TEACHER: award winner——"MY WIFE-MY TEACHER " 

M C Gupta
28 August 2003



M C Gupta
28 August 2003