A mothers’ fear

“Aunti, give us that pencil”, young children behind the ventilation, called out. A woman who was so engrossed collecting green grasses to feed her cattle, did not hear the call from the children.

“Aunti, give us that pencil”, they raised their voice to a bit louder. Now, the woman, raised her head and turned towards the voice. The voice was coming from behind the wall to wall ventilation, which also served as a window of the class room. One of them have dropped the pencil and without her help the pencil would be lost in due course of time, as children are not allowed in that garden owned by NAFA - art gallery, inside the Bal Mandir premises.

Somehow, she knew that the class room belongs to an orphanage and she stopped her work and then headed towards the window to search for the dropped pencil. While she was searching for the lost pencil, a fleeting thought flickered in her head, ‘it would have been my children, there asking for something to somebody helplessly.’ Because she herself was a mother of two young children less than five years old.

She spoke softly to those children, while she looked for the lost pencil as guided by the children. At last she found it and then handed it to its right owner.



She hurriedly cut some more grasses and then made a tight pack of it so that it won’t spill on the road as she had to cover almost an hour to reach her home to feed her hungry cattle. She did not shared ‘the thought’ with other women with whom she was cutting and collecting green grasses.

The faces of those innocent children, kept coming in her mind all the way back home and weeks that followed and she tried to brush it off in vain, because the thought really had frightened her.

Coincidentally, within a years time the woman was suffocated first and then killed by her husband with the help of her mother-in-law. Then she was hanged on to make it look like as if she had committed suicide. While the husband was sent to jail, her two young children was landed in the orphanage. Call it bad luck or call the nightmarish thought which came true was what she feared most but that exactly happened in her life.

When her two children was admitted in the ‘Bal Mandir’, they were about five and three years old.