by DR. SAROJINI SAHOO
(This is one of my fresh stories and has not been included in any of my collections.
It’s a story about a hypothetical relationship developed between a mother and her young son. Mother is a careerist and her son is an introverted alien soul. Son has a sense of being a right soul in a wrong body, but he can’t open his feelings to mother.
The total story is based on an online chat between mother and her son. Their relationship, the lack of warmth in feelings, and their confinement to their own world, all appear through their conversation. They always feel they were moving on two parallel linear paths and it was not possible to traverse each other. Still, whenever they felt their hearts heavy with any saddened moment, they used to call each other.)
“Dear, please listen to this song,” she wrote to her son. It was a song in English about the feelings of an eight-year-old boy who lost his parents in a plane crash. She attached the file and sent it, and waited in anticipation.
The text of the message said, “This was written and composed by one of my friends.”
“Well, let me listen to it first,” he wrote back to his mother.
The son started melting slowly as if a pain had been igniting in his heart and all his sorrows started to melt. The image of melted candle wax flowing down over the candle holder described what happened inside him. Whoever the singer was he did not know but the tone was sufficient to make him refrain from comment.
In that song, the little boy was searching for his parents within the clouds; searching over the mountains; through the forest; beyond the waves on the beach. He was searching for his parents behind the smoke rising from burning leaves; among rushing springs; in a framed photograph; in the starry sky and from the dark night. The little boy was searching for his parents in every room of the house in which he lived. He was even searching for them in the snow which fell from the sky. He was searching everywhere.
Her son was getting sentimental. Unmindfully he typed, “Uf!”
Scent of Own Ink for more