SHE opened the bathroom door. He lay dead inside. She called me, her voice hysterical. They had, had a drink the night before, and another and another and another, and he already with liver ailment had staggered to bathroom and she to bed.
It was not a bed she belonged to. She was not his wife. The wife had left years ago, when the battle twixt bottle and her had been won by Herr Bottle! He had once been my closest friend and the only friend I had in a big city. On his old faithful two – wheeler we rode the roads and painted the town a lively crimson. But in the night the bottle.
There were many demons he tried to chase away with the spirits inside glass container. “Bob,” he cried to me once in agony, “she left us when I was ten, my brother eight and little sis’ five. Our father brought us up, while she gallivanted with a young man.”
I met her many years later, a painted lady who still clung onto a man ten years her junior. I saw my friend cringe as he looked at her acting like cheap floozie. I heard his cry for a mother who left for the pleasures of life.
My friend’s own marriage never worked. Two children came out of unhappy wedlock. They watched a loving father by day become a tyrant at night. “Don’t let the past break your present and their future,” I told him as we sat together, the three of us, his desperate wife pleading along with me. But he was too emotionally weak and drained to even try.
I will not go for funeral. I know who will be there. A mother weeping for her son. She wept for the other three years ago. I do not want to stand with her and weep for friend who cried throughout for same mother, who now sheds tears for him, too late.
She had left the house one morning and walked away with smart man in officer’s uniform. I can hear a hundred voices saying. “Its her life!” I can hear the romantics yelling, “Love is blind!” and others muttering, “She left him for a better man!”
I can only place before you; three children whimpering that morning when they saw their mother gone. Can you hear with me a death knell ringing when fathers abandon homes or mothers their children?
If perchance this piece is read by someone among you who looks with delight at Clark Gable in her office or at sweet smelling pony tail. Think again my friend. Some children never recover.
The call from college hostel warden this morning said it all. “She came back drunk last night, “the warden said. “She cries for her father!” His child. The nightmare begins once again. Such stories never end! Why start them?
