Don't know when mother died

"Mother died today, or may be yesterday" That's how Camus begins one of his stories. (outsider, I think.)

My story should begin with, ' I don't know when my Mother died, but when I learned of her demise, five years had passed." And this is exactly how it should be expressed. She must have died in 2002. I was setting up my own family then.

Camus' protagonist is a alienated skeptic. He is neither involved nor is he evolving. He does not care, rather he does not care whether he cares or not. He is an outsider.

My case is different: I am involved and I am interested in evolving. I am alienated but I am certainly not a skeptic. The common thing between us is the fact of our respective mother's demise.Both learn of it, it seems, through a third source. Both were obviously absent at the funerals. Yet something registers in their respective minds on learning of their mothers' deaths. Their expressions of it differ. Camus is resigned, it matters little to him that his mother died "today, or may be yesterday". When I learned of my mother's death five years later, I went through a tight emotional jam. I was oppressed, I was stifled. The one thing on my mind then, I remember, was to want to breathe, for I was choked with guilt. I went to Matri Mandir and sat there talking to my mother, hoping to tell her that I did not mean to lose contact with her while she was there.

The thought of her dying almost never occurred to me. It is peculiar this attitude of man to death - you do not feel the impact of the loss until you have actually lost a dear person although somewhere at the back of your mind you know that the person HAD To die one day.

Out of four of my siblings not one tried to contact me. They knew of my whereabouts in Pondicherry. When Viraj, my younger brother, died of nephritis in 1995, I was called home. My brother sent me a wire to the ashram address. When our only mother died no one bothered, and that rankles. We met recently and I said to them humorlessly that I would ask her to come back and die again so as to give "You freaks another chance". What more could I say? No matter what we do now to reconcile, I shall carry this sadness and guilt for a long time.