There was a girl who collected stars...

The colored walls of the playroom sang nursery rhymes into my ears. The Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the miniature animals frozen on the bright wall reminded me of a childhood with colours, alphabets, numbers and cartoons. The childlike wall of this room diffuses the sharpness of the building and the world around. Charts of wild animals, vegetables, fruits, modes of transport hung on every corner of the room. The thermocol models of homes and volcanoes fought with the wobbly sketches of stick figures to find spaces on the tables. The shaky, immature lead strokes portrayed pictures of family and pets on the yellow pages, held by the table for display.
Three line figures with two beady eyes and a broad smile almost touching their eyes, held hands as they stood below a bright rainbow. I could see the infinite invisible lines erased in the past, peeking from the background of the picture. The trials and errors, the pencil strokes and eraser crumbs spoke about the tender grip of a small hand. All smiles and happiness brimmed out of that picture, so much so, that it can only survive in this playroom. The world outside those windows could suck away that joy like a vacuum and tear away the smiles leaving nothing to survive.  My hands moved to my pocket instinctively, touching the white pills covered in shiny plastic.
“Sorry to keep you waiting Mr. Joshi” said the Head Mistress as she approached me with a rolled paper in hand. Her black and maroon saree fell neatly on her tall, lean body. Her round spectacles hung on her chest, courtesy of her plastic spectacle chain.
“Thank you for coming. I know it must be difficult for you to be here after…” Her words jump off her mouth, vanishing into thin air.  Afraid maybe of touching an open wound.  I shouldn’t have come. I thought I was ready but I am not.
I see her eyes fill with that retched sympathy. I can’t stand the look of pity. Sorrow has long left me or maybe decided to hide behind the anger, the madness, the feeling of injustice. I know the anger within me is waking up to never fall asleep as I can never really escape these eyes until the day I die. Which is soon.
She clears her throat shaking the silence so that she could explain her urgent call this morning. This morning as I, a victim of unbearable pain, stood outside various medical stores along with victims of diseases to find the cure to my illness. Each of the five stores handed to me in different packages the same sleeping pills. Suspicion is a strong possibility especially if, a man who lost his daughter asks for a curious amount of sleeping pills from a single store.
“I called you here today to give you this” she extends the rolled paper into my hands. “I had this stored in my chamber after Arya was hospitalized. I wanted to give this to her. But ….”
“But I did not have the guts to visit her in the hospital, to see her in pain. I couldn’t bring myself to. I thought I could live like that.” She chuckled lightly, almost sarcastically. “I thought I was dodging a bullet by not visiting her and pushing myself into a pit of sorrow. I was…” She paused. “Afraid.” Her voice visibly tore and her eyes gleamed with tears.
“I was wrong, so wrong. Seeing her drawing everyday at my table, seeing her every day, the pain I was afraid of found me. By dodging the bullet I think I took a dagger to my heart because the guilt of not being with her during her last days eats me way every day. But this” she looks at the paper in her hand “It also comforts me. It comforts me to know that I have pieces of her left in this world. That she’s not all gone.”
No one will ever understand my pain, I think. The hole in my heart, the punch in my gut and the piercing needles on my leg. I haven’t slept in days, nightmares always find me. The image of my Arya sleeping on the hospital bed with tubes strangling her throat, injections scaring her skin, oxygen mask choking her breath and death slowly taking away life from her eyes. I haven’t got enough of holding her in my arms, enough of seeing her sleep, enough of seeing her complain about her homework.  I haven’t got enough of her smile, her voice. Death snatched her away before I got to see enough of her.
The Head Mistress continued, pulling me back from my emotions.
“When I see this, I sometimes feel nothing has changed. That I could walk into II A and she would still be sitting there. Over the time, this has given me the courage to see her in my students, to love them like I loved her. And, I want you to have it. If anything could pull you back to life, I believe it is this.” She looked at circles under my eye, my shabby beard and possibly at the hole in my heart and the pills in my pocket.
I rolled open the last trace of my daughter’s existence. It hits me like a punch in the stomach before I can react. I see stars of blue, gold, silver, red and yellow tracing the top of the paper. I get flashes of the tiny fluorescent stars stuck on the walls of her room, the space explorer school bag, the NASA sticker on her notebooks, her storybooks about the sun and moon, her hospital apron where I drew stars every time she took a injection without crying, her stuffed toy star that she clenched tightly every time she had a bad dream, her tiny star necklaces and earrings and her irritation on not being able to pronounce the word ‘Astronaut’.
When she slept in the hospital almost tired of the pain, when she begged me to take her home. I always promised her “Just a few more days and then I will take you to watch the stars” and I think in many ways  I promised myself too and convinced myself that every time the doctor rushed her to the ICU she would live to watch the stars.
Below the stars are two stick figures holding hands. My thumb grazes over the tiny figure, trying to touch her face, arms and legs. What I see next shakes me and pulls me down to the ground. I can’t read; tears are flooding my face. My heart explodes and I don’t know now if I am crying blood or tears. With trembling hands, I read what her tiny wobbly hands, wrote. “I LOVE YOU PAPA! TAKE ME TO THE STARS”.
I am crying, not as man who lost his daughter but as a father who couldn’t keep his promise. My body can’t take the intensity of my emotion. I am wailing with pain as my tears fall into the stars, smudging them a little.
“She lives through you, Mr. Joshi” the headmistress whispered.
I looked into her eyes, they belonged to a parent. 
I closed my eyes and she was there. Her tiny hands were wrapped around my neck as she was giggling with joy. “Papa!” she screamed into my ear while her brown eyes glowed with childlike love. She has my eyes, I realized.
Housekeeping that evening will find packs of pills abandoned in the dustbin and along with a man’s resignation.  I walked out of the building not as a man who lost his daughter but as a man set out to fulfill his promise to his daughter because hope and life called me, Arya called me.

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