mage created by Golam Mohiuddin | AI-Generated (Gemini)

THE UNHEARD CALL

A Son’s Journey Through Sixteen Years of Silence

Sixteen years. Five thousand eight hundred and forty days and nights. Though the time sounds vast, memories do not respect the calculations of time. On the pages of the calendar, I have moved from thirty-one to forty-seven. I see the dark circles under my eyes and the gray in my hair in the mirror — but deep within my soul, that thirty-one-year-old youth remains frozen in guilt.

When Mother passed away, I was not by her side. I feel the weight of this absence like a heavy stone in every breath. Later, when I heard from my aunt that Mother chanted only my name until her very last heartbeat, a sharp and steady pain made a permanent home in my chest. Was she looking toward the door then? Did she think with every footstep that her boy had finally arrived? I could not quench that final longing, that last thirst. This wound of inability cannot be healed by any ointment. It is a debt that has no opportunity for repayment.

Sometimes in the middle of the day or at a busy street corner, I suddenly stand still. I see a man of my own age holding his elderly mother’s hand, carefully helping her cross the road. Perhaps the man is annoyed by the slow pace of his mother, but a wave of intense lament plays through me. It would be wrong to call it jealousy. It is actually a kind of cry — the cry of seeing someone else with the paradise I have lost. It feels as if I could trade all the riches of the world just to touch Mother’s cool, wrinkled hand for one moment today. If only I could call out loudly in the middle of the night and say, Mother, here I am, I have come, and I will not go anywhere else.

The final lesson of her life ended with my name For me only a lifetime of helplessness became the frame Let the fireflies glow in the city and the fairs of color arrive My sky remains stuck in that afternoon to survive

This hand went to touch your chin but reached nothing at all In my room now only the rain of a sorrowful night will fall Sixteen years passed alone and many more will pass by The wound of your name stays on the left of my chest until I die

The human mind is very strange. It endures mountain-like grief, but it cannot bear the emptiness of small moments. Even today when I sit down to eat, it feels as if Mother will come from the next room and ask, son, is the curry alright? Or when I have a fever, I still look for the touch of that cold hand on my forehead in my sleep. I am very grown up now with many responsibilities on my shoulders, but the absence of Mother still keeps me as helpless as that lonely little boy.

The call that Mother wrote on the wind sixteen years ago still wanders around me like a spirit. I know Mother is not here, but she exists in my every sigh, in my every success, and in my every lonely tear. Mother, stay well on the other side. The boy you called by name still searches for your familiar face in every crowd. Even today it feels as if someone will call from behind and say — My boy, when will you return?