62. MY DEAREST MOM NOW BESET WITH DEMENTIA.

We were all overwhelmingly miserable about mom’s pathetic condition. She would be the blissful sort now and the scarifying and impulsively depressed the next moment. We never knew what next she would resort to do and when.  Highly unpredictable was she. Our dad never permitted us out of the house until my mom would recover. Was that the onset of age related dementia? I did not know. She would peculiarly stare at us now and then as though she was seized of some visual hallucinations. She would smile, then laugh like a mare and dissolved in sort of panic and unfathomable sorrow.

As per the code of conduct, we had to abide by, the street and every portal of the other house there was, out of bound for us. We had very little socializing interaction those days. We had never been to any wedding, festive gathering, not even to the funerals on the occasions of the death, and all the sacraments following. WE NEVER KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD so long as our dad was alive. Actually, we lived not in any “iron curtain” but in an over protected multi-insulated environment. Dad was the world life and the law.

We had never seen a movie until my youngest sister became seven and that was when my father had already died. However, but for the stories of the Pakistani and Delhi Urdu dailies and the religious magazines we knew nothing of the external sphere. Some seventeen solid dry languid years we had spent in this manner before we stepped out in an open-minded alien outside world, after our dear dad left us and this world.

Everything was new to us, the borrowed fashion outside, the mean and malicious language spoken there in the dirty streets, and the messy relationships in the families outside, mere hollow rituals regarding both happy as well as sad events, and quarrels followed after inebriation.  We saw hypocrisy in everything in every person and everywhere. The daily cultural milieu seen by us was unkempt to us and strange.  We found ourselves left in an insecure jungle full of beasts of society.

Those days there was neither computer nor we heard anything about the TV. The transistor did not have its advent yet.