Why Did It Happen?

(5)

That night, I came back to the hostel alone, contemplating on my way how a single mother could do such an amazing job at her children’s upbringing. Such a rare sight, yet so pleasant.

The next day, Dan sent a leave application for a month to the principal of our university and had to resign from his evening job. This was so, because even though the principal granted him the leave application unhesitatingly, he had to face some tantrums from his boss at the evening job.

“Are you out of your mind?! A MONTH’S LEAVE? Who will do your work? What do you expect me to do? Hire assistants who will do your job, and then send them away when you return. Why should I be so harsh on them and so lenient to you?”

“Please try and understand Sir. My mother is really sick. If I don’t spend her last moments with her, I’ll regret it my whole life.”

“Well then. You go to your sick mother, but bear in mind, if you walk out of that door right now, you’ll regret THAT your whole life because there are many more boys out on the street who are willing to do work and have no family drama going on. In short, if you go right now, you are fired!” All that while, Dan had been looking his boss in the eye, evidently unperturbed by the threats. Then he said, “Sir, if you can be so insensitive as to call my leave application because my mother is dying a ‘family drama’, then you might as well start looking up for a new assistant. I resign. I don’t need your money. My love for my mother is much greater than that. It’s something incomprehensible to an unsympathetic mind.” With that he walked off. I had never been prouder of him!

During the following three weeks, they went everywhere! Being a religious Indian woman, Dan’s mother had always wanted to visit Vaishno Devi – a manifestation of three Hindu Goddesses in the town of Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, India. Considering her medical condition, she couldn’t practically go there. So Dan bought small idols of the three Goddesses.

“Where in the whole of Oxford did you find these?” his mother inquired, astonished.

“That is a secret, which dies with me”, replied Dan and gave a playful wink to his mother.

Dan’s mother was craving for biryani, so they went to an Indian restaurant. She had always wanted to have a look at the King’s Cross station, so they took her there. She wanted to have a glance of river Thames at night, so with a special permission from the doctor, they took her there too. She wanted to have one last look of St. Paul’s Cathedral, so they went there as well. All this time, even though she was enjoying heartily, her health was deteriorating. After two weeks, her health had degraded to such a point that the doctors advised her complete bed rest, fearing that too much of exhaustion might result in an early death.

Two days later, at 6:00am, when the whole of England was rising, she went to a deep, deep sleep. A sleep, from which, she never again woke up.