The Lost Feather

       That evening, the dark sobriety exhaled the impending doom, the propunder of something scary. Udaivan rolled up confused, famished and knocked around battered in his dim-lit room, friendless and vulnerable.  The protracted European winters had been bewildering to the Delhi boy. That evening it seem to have extended its gloom over the twilight evening. Udai appeared ruffled up. He resolutely, gritting his teeth, indulged in those treasured memories that usually would take unusual turn for the worse. Leaving Udai in abject pain.

      That evening, while returning to his hostel after his routine classes, Udaivan had already made a plan to put together his mother’s recipe of home-cooked curries. Distinctly conjuring up and anticipating the appetizing flavors. He missed his dim guess, dim to his faint culinary skills, to conjecture the spices brought into play and exploited in the kitchen thousands of miles away by his mother. How could he bring them to his hostel room.
     Udai was lost in a train of thoughts. His robust misty eyes welled up. How could he forget the perched up flavors of the spices on his tongue? How could he be oblivious to the memory of the sweet music created by her mother's tinkling glass bangles, while she thumped her fist over the stone mortar? He curled up his lips, lifted his smile up and recreated those images in his mind’s eye to live through those moments again with a deep sigh, those sounds, and the assured secret code of those lip-smacking dinner served to his ever-famished, and laden-eyed, sleepy teenaged self.

     Those days, he had known the ropes of tirelessly frolicking around in his daily enervating rendezvous with tribal boys in the sunlight hours in their fiery indigenous tribal sports in Bhilai. The heat waves of Bhilai summer afternoons hardly daunted his playfulness, their collective energies. Every evening while he would secretly enter the house from the back door of the huge government bungalow built in acres of land and was entitled to his father, he knew Amruta would come to his rescue. Amruta was Adidev’s favorite child, the harbinger of his fortune and being stickler to his obedience.

    Udai had been oblivious of the world around him, except when he would be back from his daily frolics, the memory of monstrously gobbling down chapattis after chapattis with the sumptuous curry was still as fresh as young mango tree blossoming in their backyard. Sukanya, his mother, would often reminded him to discontinue feasting on them. Udai would yield to his mother’s demand approximating it to a command. When Sukanya would announce “Enough Udai”, he would resort to her commands like greased lightning. Like an innocent little brat who would anchore his life and moral being on his mother. Udai impetuously pinned his childish innocent faith on her, even for his ravenous appetite. Still his stomach cleaved to his backbone, his sinking cheeks enhanced his jawline prominently and slender arms hanging sideways made him a butt of a standing joke among family and friends.

    Udai would be at the forefront to hit the bed ahead of the scheduled timetable to sleep, a time schedule drafted by his ruthlessly disciplined father. Udai scarcely adhered to the routines, any routine. His daily act of obedience would trigger off undue pain to his stickler to the rules siblings Sukumar, Kanti and Amruta.

  That evening, he had painstakingly worked out, with no intention to beating around the bush, to rustle up that same taste in his hostel room of a prestigious technical university in distant Sofia.
    Sofia, the capital of the socialist republic country Bulgaria, has been the hub of  study for the international students. Udai had roadmapped his educational journey in Bulgaria, after attending the lecture held during his tenure in St. Stephens college. Three years before, in an unprecedented situation, unprecedented to his parents, and had embarked upon it. His arduous decision of travelling to Bulgaria for higher education had put his parents up the creek. The decision that had impinged Sukanya the maximum.

   Udai premeditated to chalk out taste and nostalgia of home-cooked meals after an outstretched, extensive but tiring week of project submissions. The divine image of Sukanya, the image of his mother relentlessly followed him as a religious, upright and strong woman. Sukanya had fought many battles in a teeny-weeny home ground but for Udai it was her Herculean proclivity for vegetarianism that daunted him and would throw him into a tizzy. Howbeit, that day Udai recalled over other things, her recipe of any lip-smacking curry as the chimera of his elusive imagination. Imagination that he had purportedly invoked to confront and deal with his muddled brain on a snowy evening.