Dear Mother

As my age advances on amid plodding feelings ruefully apologizing for every failure, especially the core failure as against your only wish for what I to be, I am yet palpable of your even such tiny piece of advice, the astute way of taming me, relating to what we saw en route for Paro Bazaar from the school. After crossing the rickety ancient bridge roofed and plank-floored, walking alongside the asphalted road lined with short-fat-trunked willows on either side and leaping over the gutter by the road to take the foot path between the road and the head-high compound wall of the palace, you pointed to a guy urinating into a pond by the road on the other side and taught me through frightening yet impressive story of how such misdeed like urinating in water would be punished in the hell.

‘Ashang Choegyal (Uncle Dharma Raj), the inspector general of hell, would command you in his heart-shuddering tone to sieve away urine from the water,’ she said with motherly love to teach me through her way. It’s a sort of riddle for me then. I at once got the maze-work, when I was almost 7. I wondered how one could strain urine from water like solid things or skim it like cream from milk. It’s the impossibility or the heavy conundrum that made me dread more than the school annual examinations. So since then I’ve best avoided doing so.

Through self-inflicted pains and quasi joys I have come to be able to forebear an obnoxious grimace from a complete stranger taking it as the reaction of his pains and desperation…

Through indolent high-will I've come to accept with resignation that even such will, though latent, matters before pettier messes.

Through such folds of oddities I can make it present what lies ahead or in the end.

But through the incorrigible deceit of this conceit, the rooted notion of independence, I do confess that it’s the prime stronghold in close-hand-tie with biased self-love that overpower and shroud the latency estranged alien like something preposterous.

Yet, those pieces of yours interspersed amid such messes glisten, heal, inspire—the only source of prop up, a push forward. They’re my jewels, my life-breaths to brave ahead an inch in sound way that doesn’t mean what it’s taken as ‘able’, ‘clever’, ‘reputed’ in the way coveted or what life is interpreted to be or should be. And a piece of yours:

A corny soul flutters over fusses

A solicitude unfelt aloof muses—

The sour-joy burden taken numbed

For insomnia those wiles chaff-wounded.