Mullurkara is a tiny village in God’s Own Country, not far from the banks of Nila River. Exuberantly green in the monsoons, and gloomy in all other seasons! The river that ran furiously with swollen banks once is dying a slow death. The bridge across the river and the railway station are part of my childhood memories. As ever, the station looks abandoned after the last passenger train for the day departed. An old house and a lotus pond in the backyard, vast paddy fields and green forests beyond, all steeped in eternal stillness. This is my family house, where my parents are living a lonely life, in their old age.

Both in mid-70s, they eagerly wait for a daily phone call from Mumbai. Nothing much to talk, but will talk endlessly — about their routine blood tests, an occasional visit to the hospital, and the medicines that make them drowsy. “We are living on borrowed time,” they keep reminding me. Each call is incomplete without a mention of my school days, my college days. How days have passed by, seasons changed. On their surprise meeting with my old school teacher. On my first poem that was printed in a Malayalam newspaper. On the cycle they gifted me despite not clearing the engineering entrance test, and breaking their hearts. Every time, I went back in time, two long decades, and ended up their disobedient boy. Each call ends on a positive note: “When will you come home, next?”

Tomorrow is far away, and shrouded in uncertainty. Last time, when I got an emergency call and rushed to the ICU in Thrissur heart hospital, I could barely see my mom across the glass wall. I was told she was smiling. For me, Onam is an aroma that wafts out of my mom’s busy kitchen – of Sambhar and Avial and the freshly fried papads. The feast is incomplete without mom’s ada payasam and steamed bananas. As another Onam passes by, silently, I will make a surprise visit home. I can’t wait for ‘tomorrow’.