Mother and son

The mother scrubs furiously at the pieces of her clothing while seated on a small stool inside the toilet. She scrubs with increasing ferocity like a locomotive picking up pace on a relentless rail line. Her mind is a train of thoughts, one cabin after another being pulled along by the locomotive of her furious scrubbing.

Being a traditional housewife, she prefers the method of washing her clothes on a wooden washboard, eschewing the spanking new washing machine her son had bought for her. The son and his wife wash their clothes using the washing machine, but not the old woman who prefers the traditional method - more energy sapping, but cleaner.

Looking at the soap suds, a vision opens through the transparent suds to a happier time of a bygone era. As her train of thoughts rumbles on, she sees her son, a child of twelve, consoling her after one of her husband's drunken rampages. Son telling her that he will earn a lot of money and take care of her in her old age. Son promising to make her proud by graduating from university. Son swearing he will get a good job when he graduates and make her proud....

A smile breaks out on her face as the train of thoughts takes her deeper and deeper into old familiar surroundings - reminiscences take on the shape of their sparsely-furnished house, crystallise into faces of herself, her son, and her husband those terrible years ago, metamorphose into visions of different happy moments she shared with her only son...and those happy moments invariably wring out a smile from the current bitterness of her heart and life.

Like the ink of an octopus poisoning her sweet recollections, staining them dark; her train of thoughts is derailed and she falls into a ravine of conflicting emotions. She thinks of then and now, now and then. Thinks of how her son has become another man ever since he got married. Thinks of how he is no longer the innocent child of twelve, but a calculating, cold and callous man of thirty who does not bat an eyelid at sending his aged mother to an old folks' home. Sending his mother who had slogged so hard to bring him up ever since his father left the family, to an old folks' home in the twilight of her life. A son who only listens to his wife now, and not his mother. The blood has turned cold in him, stained black by the ink of the octopus. He's the death of me, and a son like him, he's better off dead, she thinks angrily to herself, her memories now darkening.

She lands with a thud in the ravine, as a shrill phone call shatters her reverie, returning her to reality. Putting aside her washing, she drags her tired limbs off the stool and shuffles into the living room, picks up the telephone.

What the caller says turns her blood cold. Her angry thoughts translated to life! Her son in a traffic accident and dying. To hurry to hospital, the nurse is saying.

She lets the receiver drop to her side and eyes glistening, falls back onto the sofa.