i’m home

Pushing open the door silently, he peeked in cautiously, scanning around for his mother. Was she in a good mood today? Or was she prowling around, waiting to get at him?

With trembling hands, and shaky legs, he approached the kitchen towards the sounds of clanking plates and rushing water. He called out meekly to make known his presence, anticipating the kind of welcome he was going to receive.

He is long used to the moments of escalating fear which were followed by either relief or bouts of pain and hopelessness. However, the intensity of dejection does not decrease with time.

He called out again, thinking that she might not have heard him the first time. As she turned around slowly, he could feel the acceleration of his heart beat with every passing moment.

His day was not meant to be. A look of irritation flashed across his mother’s face as she looked at him. He knew what was coming but it did not lessen the heaviness in his little heart.

She screamed profanities and threw whatever she could get her hands on, at him. It would all end soon, he told himself. And it did, but not before having been cut on his forehead by a piece of shattered glass and having been bruised on his arms and legs.

Despite all the pain, he did not blame her. He knew he deserved it, he knew he did. That’s what she told him right? Why else would he be going through such agony? He once read in a book about retribution. “You reap what you sow”, it said. So all this must be due to something bad which he had done. Maybe it was the time he stole his classmate’s new mechanical pencil. Or maybe because he took a peek at another person’s paper during the Maths test.

But there was a time when life wasn’t like this. Sure there was, when Daddy was still around. However, Daddy went out one day and never came back. He heard relatives talking about “mistress” and “eloped” and wondered what those words meant. All he knew was that Daddy was never coming back.

It wasn’t that he didn’t try waiting. Wait he did, but it was all to no avail. He used to sit at the door, straining his ears to listen for the sounds which Daddy used to make. The nostalgic tip-tapping of feet as he walked along the corridor and jingling of keys when opening the door. But after 5 months and 13 days of waiting, he gave up. It was also around that time when his mother started ignoring him. Neglect slowly turned into irritation and finally random periods of hysteria.