Trrrriiiiiing.
My hand automatically reached out to the alarm clock on the table before I could open my eyes. It was a reflex triggered by the fear of waking her up, which my body had adapted to over the years. Forty seven years. I marvelled at how they had gone by in flash, almost unnoticed.
I could never get my mind around the fact that so many years had passed since those mornings when she would mumble, half-awake, in response to the alarm. 4:00 am, she would say, was a most ungodly hour to wake up. And I would laugh to myself, watching her quietly drift back to sleep. I thought of the countless non sequitur arguments we had on what time of the day could logically be classified as “morning.” It all seemed like just yesterday. But the truth was that it had been years, over which I supposed her body had adapted to ignoring the sound of my alarm.
Slowly opening my eyes, I noticed that the first few rays of the sun had silently crept into our room while we slept, and were now casting elongated shadows of the window panes across the walls. Another thing that my body had eventually adapted to over the years was waking up at not-so-ungodly hours. I smiled at the thought and slowly sat up, careful to make the quietest sounds I could while moving my rusty parts.
The milk and morning papers awaited me at the threshold. The Times of India seemed particularly grumpy about the long wait. The Hindu and I exchanged mutual feelings of joy at seeing each other.
I carried them in and put the milk to boil, before proceeding to read about Australia's spectacular win on the world cup final. She'd be sad to hear that, I thought, before reminding myself that she'd have probably caught up on the match herself the day before, and would have expressed her angst over it had I come home earlier.
I found myself anticipating the post-match analysis she always presented to me whenever I missed a match. Cricket had always gone over my head, despite all the matches I had watched with her and presently, I tried not to panic about the fact that I couldn't remember what a maiden over was. Other random cricket terminology like free hit and yorker floated through my mind, quickly piling up into a hill. These days, I seemed to be forgetting too many things. The hill seemed to be growing by the day.
I quickly glanced over the article to know who had taken the most wickets and scored the highest runs. That much information was comprehensible. Complacent, I flipped through the rest of the paper.
Fizzle. Hiss.
I dropped the Obituary page as I rushed to put out the flame. It was too late. The milk had boiled over, dripping over her precious counter. I cursed myself for getting so easily distracted with the news. I pictured her rolling her eyes and making a sarcastic remark about The Hindu before proceeding to clean up. The Hindu, like the necessity of an alarm clock in the age of smart phones and the chronological positioning of morning hours in the day, was another thing we had agreed to disagree on.
She had always preferred the Times because it had better comics and puzzles. Or so she claimed. The quality of the comics and puzzles was her top criterion to judge a newspaper. “The rest of it is going to be the same depressing news of people suffering, anyway,” she'd say. Life was very simple in her world. Amidst everything right and wrong happening with the seven billion people across the globe, she found her share of happiness in tiny black-and-white images of a delusional five-year-old and his toy tiger, in the alternating blanks and numbers on a 9x9 square, and the criss-crossing alphabets waiting to be penned into the blanks of the crossword.
Thanking my stars that she wasn't around, I proceeded to erase all evidence at the crime scene before she could wake up and become suspeecious. That's how she'd say it, elongating the second syllable in a way that only she could. I chuckled to myself at the fond stray memory.
The mewing of the cat outside the door shook me out of my reverie. I carefully poured out some milk into his cup and blew it cool as I carried it to the door. Once mortally afraid of cats, I had eventually learned to practice coexistence. Like the puzzles in the paper and the extra hours of morning sleep, they were indispensable constituents of her happiness.
The smell of coffee wafted through the air. I delighted in its aroma and poured it out into two cups. No sugar and little milk in the cup that said “Diabetic.” Extra milk in the one that said “Sleepyhead,” and precisely two and three-fourths of a spoon of sugar. I shook my hand over the cup, trying to get it to sprinkle into the cup the way it did when she made it. My hands had started shaking of their own accord in the last few years, anyway. I smiled at how I didn't have to really try that hard.
Not letting that smile slip away, I carefully carried the two cups to our room, making sure I didn't create more evidences of crime that would need erasing. I placed them on the table, seating myself at the chair before I could remember that I had left the papers on the floor. With great difficulty, I rose from the chair and waddled my way back to the kitchen. I carefully collected The Hindu, lying in disarray at the foot of the table and mentally apologized for the poor treatment it had received. The neatly folded, grumpy-looking and yet-to-be-read Times sat atop the table. I grabbed it in my other hand and made my way back to our room.
I pushed her cup of coffee to her edge of the table and placed the Times of India by her pillow, like I did every morning. It didn't seem as grumpy as before. Breathing a sigh of relief, I emptied my own cup and turned my attention to the page I had last been reading.
The face that had smiled from behind the morning paper for forty two years now smiled at me from within its pages. Five long years had passed since she had gone, leaving nothing much behind- Just an unread copy of the Times, an undrawn cup of coffee and an old man. And I sat staring at her, as empty as the cup in front of me.