“Mom, why is the sky blue?” was the first curious question I too asked, like many others. I looked at my innocent mother’s face twist and turn to bring forth an answer that would satisfy a five-year old’s endless curiosity. Like the delay in our old incandescent bulb, Mom’s face lit up after a delay. She immediately took out my favourite toy; “the glass-angle” as I called it, indeed got me excited.
“Do you see this, Adhi?” she asked. Her voice was as melodious as the rainbow my prism made on the walls. I nodded. “And do you see this?” she put her free hand between the seven shades and halted it on the blue tint. I could see the lines of her supple hands illuminated by soft blue light. She had what my grandma called “the unlucky line” in her hand.
“Yes,” I nodded.
“Just like this, our earth acts like a glass-angle and makes a rainbow. But… Like my hand, it is so tiny that it can only show us the blue shade.” She proudly smiled. The naivety lasted a second, until my next question.
“But the sky isn’t tiny.” Lifting and spreading both my arms, I claimed with magnanimous confidence, “It’s everywhereeeee.”
Mom chuckled. I saw a smirk come forth on her lips. “You’re a big boy, aren’t you, Adhi?” I nodded. “But mommy is bigger, aren’t I?” I didn’t nod. “But you’re bigger than an ant, aren’t you?” I nodded. “But you’re smaller than the mountain.” I refused. “Just like that… our sky is tiny compared to our bright sun. Like you are to the mountain. Like I am to you.” She tickled my sensitive tummy for giggles. I tried to fight back with my tiny arms in vain. She was my mommy. My everything. My sky and my sun. There was nothing she couldn’t answer.
“Supriya! Did you finish preparing for dinner?” Grandma asked. Except that, i guess. Like me when I am trying to hide the half-eaten biscuits, mom began dicing the vegetables that laid still for the last hour. She winked at me.
“Do you know everything, Mom?” I asked again, five long years later. Over which she taught me the ins and outs of the world. My question was valid. For she had answered all that I ever asked. Even those my teachers couldn’t touch without scolding me.
“Why do you ask all these irrirtating questions, Adhitya? You are disturbing the flow of my class,” said one of them when I asked her, “Why does the ball come down when I throw it up?”
“Well, do you, Mom?”
“Of course not, Adhi! Anyone who says they know everything is a liar.” She smiled. Her temple had began showing the first wrinkle. Yet her bright yellow saree illuminated even the blue skies on that particular day.
“Why don’t you know everything, Mom?” I asked.
“Let me ask you this. Why do you want to know everything?”
“Umm….” and about six more hours later, with my head hung low, I answered. “I don’t know.”
Mom placed her still-wet hands on my chin and raised it. “There is no shame in not knowing, Adhi. I would say… that is the reason we ask questions. So that we can know. But if you know everything… then what will excite you? Who will come to me every day and ask marvellous questions with shining bright eyes? Won’t you get bored? Worse… Won’t I?” She chuckled and pulled my hair onto her warmth.
“But mom… My friends said God knows everything. Won’t God be bored? Do you think such a God exists?” I persisted. Yet, she, Supriya Dutt, professor to graduate students sat down on the floor with a ten-year-old and smiled, thinking about an answer… just as she did every time.
“I am going to say something that is not true now, okay?” she said. I nodded. “I think God is the answer people made up because they are afraid to say, ‘I don’t know.’” Her deep black eyes and golden brown skin shone in the morning sunlight.
“Why do you say that’s a lie?” I asked.
“How can you say that’s the truth?” she reverbed. “Did I show any proof?” I shook my head. “Did God show any proof of themselves?” I shook again. “Then..”
“Then why do people believe in God, Mom?” I asked.
“Why did you believe in my answers, Adhi? Did I ever give any proof to your questions? Yet you chose to believe me, didn’t you?” she asked. My ten-year-old brain couldn’t grasp the magnitude of her question. But I knew the answer in my heart… Because you made sense. God doesn’t. “For some people, just like you, God made sense. Few of them turn bad, and some turn good. But all… believe in something.” She smiled. Her joy was incomparable to the blooming sunflowers in our garden. I knew then and there who God was. God rode a blue scooter with a red helmet and a yellow saree. And she had the brightest smile in the world.
For seven more years, she answered every single question I had. My God was efficient! Unlike yours. My mother would have scolded me for even thinking that. “That singular thought is the basis of all religious wars,” she would have lectured; with the first tinge of a grey strand in her hair and new black-rimmed glasses to accompany. Every single thought and curiosity I had, she answered. Except… on that day, when she fell silent for the first time.
“Mom, why did dad leave us?” I saw the smile on her face slowly arch down like a graph, into a straight line, and then to a lopsided parabola. For the first time, I could see that she wasn’t struggling to provide me with an answer. She simply…
“I don’t know.” It was the first time I made my mother cry. I hope it was also the last. I held her weeping eyes to my chest and allowed her to be human. No… I was wrong all along. She was merely human. Astonishingly human. With all the emotions, dreams, hopes, and genius of one. She didn’t know everything. She was not something as meager as God, she was my mother.
“There’s no shame in not knowing,” I said, to the inconsolable weeps.
Yet… to her, my weeps were nothing beyond consolable.
“What’s the cure to a broken heart, Mom?” I fell on her lap with tears.
Her soft hands rode over the skin of my hair. Trying to salvage her son from his weeps of horror. Gently, she said, “Time.”
“Why should anyone believe in love? When it hurts so much.” I retaliated.
“I don’t know,” she replied. Her hands grazed still. Above our heads were the starry skies where the sun couldn’t rise. “I guess there are some things in this world we do… not because it makes sense. But because it makes us… us. Love is something like that. It is beautiful and ugly. It is joyous and painful. It is what’s between us… and those away from us. Yet it is deeply human. Love… is one of those things we’re incapable of understanding, but choose to believe in. We choose to love. And sometimes it rewards us. Like it did for me, with you,” she answered.
The sun rose and fell over and over. More questions were asked, more answers were given. She had risen back to her immaculate efficiency. I traversed along the lines of the universe’s secrets, only to find her ahead, holding the doors open for me.
The second time I got her speechless was to the an age-old question. “What’s the purpose of life?” To which her face twisted again. “Why even bother working so hard in life, when it’s meant to end?”
After a long minute, she replied. “I don’t know the answer to your first question. It’s embarrassing considering my hair should indicate the contrary. But the second, I do. Life isn’t meaningless because of death. Life is only meaningful because of it. If you had infinite time and resources, you could achieve everything you can conceive. It is because you don’t that we try to achieve finite meanings from the time we have. And that, Adhi… is life. It’s a journey of finding meaning. A meaning that we don’t truly understand. Hence my inability to answer your first question.” Supriya Dutt retired as the head professor in her department. With students and colleagues alike visiting our home during and after the process. I always wondered as a child why would anyone want to visit a teacher’s home. Until I realized I had been living inside the home of one since my birth.
“How do you know everything, Mom?” I laughed. Hugging her now nimble arms in the process. Those arms which are capable of carrying the weight of the universe. Those arms which carried me throughout life.
“I have a question for you,” she announced. Her deep black eyes fawned at me with curiosity. I nodded excitedly, nervously. “What do you want to be in life, Adhi?” She stared blankly. Then shook her head and said, “I asked it wrong. What do you hope to achieve with your life?”
“I want to be like you, Mom.” The sparkle in her eyes outshone the sun.
But she replied only with, “Elaborate.”
“To be able to answer questions. Not just of people, but of the entire universe. I don’t want to be bound to earthly matters. It’s so boring. But out there, in the vast blue space, there exists a world beyond any other. But to understand that I need to study the bricklaying techniques of the atom. And once I understand that I am expected to tend to earthly matters. AH…. that’s boring, Mom. I want to explore the universe. I want to be a part of the universe.”
I saw the smile on her face stretch and widen until it broke into eventual laughter. “Oh dear me! I was raising a budding questionnaire my entire life.” She held the sides of my cheeks and squeezed them as if I were five years old again. “I’m happy,” she declared. “Let me answer one more question that you didn’t ask.” I nodded as always. “What you see outside there. In the deep blue space are the same atoms my hand is made of. They follow the same rules, the same flow, and the same duties. We are all made of stardust. They are all made of us. My dear Adhi… we too are part of the universe. An insignificantly small one to say, yet tremendously significant for ourselves. Because we are limited. Our capabilities and time aren’t infinite. Hence you might wonder, “Then what am I doing this for?” But as we established before… that cruel reality is what gives our conquests meaning. To study the universe, you must face earthly matters. You might feel that insignificant. For what are we but a tiny virus on the titanic ocean? But I would argue the same for atoms. They are mostly empty space, yet they makeup everything you see, touch, and experience in this world. Are they insignificant? Even when they’re so empty, their collaborations make non-empty structures. Why? All the theories you learn. Quantum, relativity, Newtonian, and plain old eyesight, are all languages we developed to understand something none of us are capable of thinking about. Yet… we pursue it. We do it with just as much importance as earthly matters. We do it with just as much passion as the empty atoms.” She smiled. “Now… did I answer your question? Or did I plant more in you?”
“The second,” I replied. A cartoon character would be able to see the smoke coming out of my ears, trying to digest Supriya Dutt’s words. Yet she smiled.
“You’re welcome,” she declared, and left me on a train to the unknown. I travelled through those rails with grit and perseverance. Stopping occasionally for the weird. Contributing my own weirdness to those who followed. Tending to universal and earthly matters alike. Answering Supriya Dutt’s unanswerable questions. Leaving my own for those who would follow in my footsteps. Until I hit another stumble… which I knew not how to pass.
“Mom… what am I going to do without you?” I asked. Her frail arms shook in my own. The greys had taken over her hair. The folds, her face. Yet even with toothless teeth, her smile didn’t fade. Not even a second. “How can I live in a world where you aren’t there?” I asked. It must have been embarrassing to look at the grown man crying in front of his mother. I wished my wife and son wouldn’t have been there to witness it. That was my final question. A question to which I expected her to answer ‘I don’t know.’ A question I hoped my son wouldn’t ask me one day. One I would have regretted asking my dying mother… If she wouldn’t have tried to answer that too. I saw her face twist and turn for the final time. And like the shine of a million stars, she pulled my ear to her lips upon victory. To give me an answer I didn’t understand.
For an entire year, I wondered about those words. I became a man riddled with questions. Questions that had no one left to answer. Supriya Dutt’s first ever student wandered about his earthly matters in confusion. If he couldn’t make sense of the final words of a human, how was he supposed to make sense of the entire universe?
“Dad?” Miya asked me one bright sunny day. Her tiny hands clung to the wrinkled cuff of my shirt. Her eyes were deep brown. Her hair was dancing around in all four directions. Her feet danced along the pavement, wearing ruby red shoes.
“Yes, dear?”
Her eyes were planted far above my head. Beyond the tallest buildings, just beneath the empty space outside of it all. Without a worry in her heart, with a smile full of holes, she questioned. “Why is the sky blue?”
And answered the question that plagued my rotting mind.
“Why isn’t it red? Or Green? Or Purple?” Miya added. Her curious eyes were like shining daggers.
I laughed. I cried. I remembered. Even then… Mom wasn’t done answering my silly questions. For she whispered, “Adhi…We live as long as the last memory of us.”
