A Beautiful Smile

II

My life was limited to our house only for the next one month. Every alternate day I went to the center to get my medicines. In the beginning, it was burdensome to stick to a single place and follow the same routine, but as the days passed I started loving the loneliness. One's company is all one needs sometimes, that's what I was getting those days. I myself became the cure of that abominable disease. Father was good with me and always showed concern whether I took medicines or not.

If I was, he says, liable of deteriorating my health that has given Mycobacterium chance to multiply and overpower me, then I'm also responsible to follow a strict lifestyle utmost needed in condition like this in order to get rid of it. I agreed and I was determined to make myself fit again. I always had a notion that my father is always wrong, as our decisions always clashed, but deep down somewhere I adored him and had a fear that I would never endure for my own child as he does for me.

For now, I have nothing to do so I started observing the room. One poster of drawing once I made in my kindergarten is pasted on the right wall, opposite to it, two frames were beckoning the past. I and my father are in both, but mother is missing in one of them.

I was five years old when these photos were clicked, I remember it clearly just because of that camera father bought which none of us knew to use. I was so exuberant that day, it was the flash of the camera that delighted me most, a sudden brightness that makes blind for a while. I gave poses all the time and insisted mother take pictures, she did it smiling. It is this smile that comes in my mind glued on her face whenever I recall her. None of us knew why father bought that camera as we had not had any pre-discussion of buying it. It now felt to me like father had a premonition of what was coming, and he wanted to prison those memories in frames to look at them in the future.

In the first photo, I'm standing ahead of my mother staring hard at the camera, her hand on my shoulders, father beside her. It was taken by a guy who gave me tuition, also, he taught mother the little peccadillos of photography. My father's intelligence was always challenged by scientific gadgets, he was told by my mother to learn the use of a camera. He tried but every time she asked to click pictures, every time he forgot which button to press. He tried hard but never got an appreciation from her despite putting in appreciating efforts.

Father swear not to touch again that little useless thing, the cause of his mocking, so mother clicked both of us in, and this picture is the best one in the real sense of photography. Father inscribed it in a frame and hung it on the wall in remembrance of her.