Virtuoso 2.

She crashed to the floor, clutching her foot, with her head down, as she silently wept.
The boy, shaken from his daze, anxiously comes up and sits beside her. He cranes his beautiful head sideways to examine and slowly runs his finger over the mehendi covered sole. She screams in pain, and then muffles it into a whimper. A silent murmur passes between both, and the boy stood up and took his place again. 

The girl unties one bow from her head and ties her bleeding foot with it. Then dusting her frock, she stands up and takes the same, stiff position with a slight grimace. The tune began to flow again, and the dance with the seraphic dance began again. 
The boy stood up slowly and picked up a small box lying beside him. If you looked carefully enough, you'd see tiny, peculiar little cuts and perforations on it. Not skipping a beat, he used his other hand to gently tap the box.

The taps grew more and more violent with each twirl of the girl. It's as if Horatio knew every move, soul of his lady Hamlet. At one point of time, the legs elongated and her hair grew longer, her skin grew fairer, and in the light of this mirage, I saw the perfect image of my graceful mother, dancing passionately but with excitement, as if she knew every secret of the set floors. 

He looked upwards and smiled with crazed euphoria as the glissando begun with the next beat.

The girl was muttering something with a calm expression on her face. Her feet grew violent, her movements grew cautious and intricate. Lost in her own rhythm, she giggled with delight. Fear passed like a shadowy streak on the boy's face, but he smiled gently as well. She spun around once and sat down in one flaccid movement. "Wasn't that fun, now? The pain made it all the more worthwhile."

The boy handed her something out of a packet, a biscuit. Crumbs fell on the stage. Good. I'd need convincing proof of the angelic visions I'd just seen. But the boy carefully brushed them away.  So lost was I in my daze, I didn't hear the ominous thud,  the children did though.

Trepidation hung in the air. In one quick stride, the boy had picked all his makeshift instruments. They raced towards the back door and halted. My eyes widened. I had shut it on my way in. The kids banged against it in surprise. They hastily tried to get it open.

"I finally got you. This is where you've been coming every night."

A man stepped into view. He would have been good looking, but constant wear, drink and frustration gave way to crease lines on his face. His eyes were red. He had an urumi in his hand.

The children had gone pale. With an expression of pure hatred and anger, he pulled them roughly off the stage. Tears ran down their face as they looked at the repugnant man, then at each other. 

Exiting through the front door must've been a scuffle. I heard shrieks. Helplessly, all I could do was stare. It would simply take one simple flick of that urumi to cut my neck into half. He, on the other hand, may not kill the children for reasons.

Shivering, I made my way back home and lay awake for a long time. The night had surely been eventful, and I was afraid I'd wake up and think it was all a dream. I stayed home for a day. 

Two days later when I made my way to the set,  I got news that there had been no break ins the previous night, but one, the night before that. I was congratulated, since I had gone to investigate. They assumed I had scared the trespassers away.

I traced my steps, hoping to find any sign of the happenings of that night. I made my way to the back door. 
Stuck on a single, rusted nail, peeking out from the hinge, was a torn red ribbon, stained darkly with blood. 

Virtuoso.

The prospect of checking on that movie set at night made me feel uneasy. The winds blew unusually quietly, tinting the dark night with the colors of eventfulness and apprehension. 

I loved the set. Perhaps it's the mere fact that it's unnatural, artificial and staged. Away from reality. How the rain, an involuntary force of nature that Indra controls with great difficulty, falls and stops with the simple click of a finger.  How anyone, can be in the immediate limelight. The way they replicate rarities like the first autumn shower or the torrent of snowflakes. Perhaps it's how you're the one who's done it all, and you still get a kick out of seeing it in action every time. 

I've been behind the lens for as long as I can remember. A pair of soft, fair hands with nimble fingers held me and brought me here, cooing a dulcet lullaby as the bright lights gave my newly opened eyes, the spark. Oh, the spark. 

I used to simply sit there, occasionally causing havoc and throwing tantrums as my mother, graceful and agile, magically twirled her waist and twisted her feet. The crease lines near her eyes as she threw me a furtive wink and a smile, as if aware of the enchantment I had lost myself into. When she passed away, however, I became no Madhubala - I chose to build Madhubalas. 

My car joined the fleet of countless others in the parking lot, and I nervously felt for the set keys in my pocket. The mystery of the countless break ins and strange rumours would now be resolved forever. 

My heart stopped and lurched when I reached the steps. The back door was ajar.
 Armed with nothing but a stick, I put my palm on the yoke of my dress, feeling my heartbeat accelerating. I gently peered to find two figures huddled on the stage, and as one cautiously backed away into the wings, I prepared myself for the capturing of the oblivious other.....
The limelight fell on the red carpeted stage. Amazed, I backed away. How on Earth did they manage to hack into the set controls?

The figure stepped in, and I froze. 

It was a tiny girl, with red ribbons and a brown velvet frock. Her skin was patchy and she was missing two fingers on her severely scratched arms, but her eyes had the same excited spark I once had, and lost as I learnt life was nothing to be happy about.

She stretched her body upwards, shut her eyes and pursed her lips as if Antoinette had tasted a raw cake, and said "Horatio, may the music begin!" 

A squeal came from the wings as a boy emerged, leaping. The girl gave him a scolding look, as if furious at his rashness. The boy retreated with a crestfallen face, and came back with a plastic toy piano, which you could probably buy for twenty bucks at the local store. He fondly stroked his fingers along the keys, as if a priceless instrument. Even the girl shot it an affectionate look. Then resuming her pose, she flicked her fingers. "Begin".

Soft, mellifluous notes began to flow from the wings, incapable of being produced from Satan's harp. The boy sat, as parts of the limelight illuminated his face and reflected off his shiny hair and lashes, colouring them golden as the specks of dust around him. As if an angel himself, sent by the Lord, to shame all the mortals who held instruments and tried to mimic him. 

My eyes fell on the girl next. Her expression had considerably softened into one of pure love and passion.  She traced patterns in the air, as if pantomiming the composition of the tunes, and her feet began to race and tap. 

Leaping high in the air, she came back to the stage in a graceful twirl of cheap, brown velvet, clicking her fingers and clashing her toes. Her closed eyes momentarily released a tear drop, as her sole bled from a rusted iron nail she'd unknowingly stepped on. 
 (To be continued) 

The Goddess And That Unfinished Bucket List.

Life is a long, long path, and there are a small number of us who actually plan it out like a strategic map. You know, with checkpoints and signboards and stress relieving techniques, yoga and hopeless idols like Baba Ramdev for the sake of appearing literate and clued-in.  Time is made up of threads which continuously switch around.

When asked to choose certain places I'd like to visit before I die, after being a freckle of fairy dust in Neverland, I chose to be a silverfish on the fabric of the space time continuum. It would be quite an adventure to mess around, trying to annoy all those busy, moving threads, causing the accidental death of a Mandela or the extremely unfortunate birth of an Indian politician. 

All the strategies would be rendered pretty much, sorry to say, pointless. However, I'm a sceptic as well. Of sorts. I do believe in checkpoints. 

I had the fortune of visiting my native paternal village. Free from duties and responsibilities or anything for that matter that weighed you down. Taunting goats with extra food became a favourite pastime. The rest would be spent making a bucket list, lazing in some hut on the fields. 


A bucket list is simply a list of all the things you want to do at least once before you die. Most of the stuff on mine is pretty much impossible.There is no way you would be kind enough to take me to the Comic Con.


Would you?
I'd be...good company.
I swear. I'll try to be polite as well.
No?

It's okay, I don't care anyway.      <Goes to a desolate corner and                                                             sounds like Himesh Reshamiya                                                             attempting a rock song>

Highly overdosed on caffeine, I lay amidst the very mustard field where Veer Zaara was shot. Since I obviously had no Veer, I simply let my mind wander. It evolved from the extremely ugly scarf in my cupboard I should throw away to whether or not Elysium is the best place after Death. Something tells me Cerberus might be cordial to fetching women.
Night used to pass making up constellations and longing for a friend who'd make your good side twinkle and shine as bright as the stars. Occasionally about debating about the existence of God. 
I remember one of my cousins bending down and whispering in the midst of a philosophical conversation, as if he was stating something composed of sheer hypocrisy, " I believe there is no God".

I gazed at him in utter, shell-shocked horror.

Of course there is no God!
The kind of God most people believe in? Wanting offerings of milk and money and young kids? Simply does not exist. 

What exactly is religion? It is a set of guidelines people follow in order to become better people. Humans are absolutely incapable of deciding what is right and what is wrong for them, so even their twenty first century selves allow themselves to be dictated blindly by scriptures written centuries ago. Why? Because those scriptures illustrate the paradigm of an ideal and right lifestyle. Because humans could never figure out not to kill one another or over intoxicate themselves.

Some people realized this and exploited it. Now the very same thing used for bringing about peace, became a source of sheer violence. Communal riots.

 I'm not an atheist because I believe in many of the selective good things religion offers, ones which don't defy all frontiers of logic. Many claim to be atheists because they think it's cool. I'm not an atheist; I like thinking of myself as secular. 

If pretending to acknowledge the presence of a higher, supreme being brings peace and a sense of reliance to people in times of mortal peril, then God should continue to be viewed as simply a highly controversial subject and not as a force of irrationality. 

People are known to be hands of God. God however, is a very busy man and cannot hear the quibbles of more than seven billion people. So sometimes thousands misread his instructions. 

They make idols. Loads of them. Worship them for a week. Then rip them bare of clothes and ornaments and leave them naked on the streets or to pollute a healthy river, which by the way is also, a resource of God.
Saving a life, is the work of God. Helping a hungry child, assisting the impaired. This, is the work of God.

He  doesn't want anyone killing. He definitely doesn't want a starving kid to stare at a lavish Puja feast held in his name. 

I sometimes wish a real human could be as honoured and loved as a Durga idol and then simply thrown away like that. Then I realized, it happens every day. 

"Slowly, then all at once"
   
My pen scraped the now worn out page of my bucket list a million times to write that. Because it would be what real pain would feel like. But I couldn't muster up enough courage. No one can, neither can they prepare for it. I doubt that even after centuries of being treated as such, even the Goddess ever comes to Earth knowing and prepared. Or perhaps the human love they give her out of selfish desire makes her momentarily forget it till the time actually comes.

The pen beside me, I look at the ugly, unfinished sentence. Striking it would make it hard to read, and I wanted to remember this unfinished entry as vividly as possible. 

And just like every parent after the kid's all grown up with its own problems to solve, she's forgotten and abandoned to rot. Wondering where all the love went. Thinking about the sweet kids that played on Earth's green fields ages ago. About her kids, who simply loved, cared and helped because it was worthwhile and made them happy. 

Thinking till the mud dissolves in the water, till she retreats back to the Heavens, disgraced, but with a smile on her face.

And true courage wasn't just defined by slaying Mahishasur any more; it was defined by coming  again  every year. 

Let There Be Pandemonium.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain neutrality in times of mortal crisis."
                                     -Dante Alighieiri, Inferno.
What I wish to question today is, why does neutrality exist?

Why is it, that people pass by  silently as women are molested on the road in front of their very eyes? Or when all of a man's daily savings are snatched by an infidel? When an ATM is robbed, how come no one bats an eyelid except the ATM Security guard? (Who probably wouldn't have either if he wasn't paid for it.)

When teachers abuse a child. When ministers abuse power. When politicians abuse the opportunity of addressing a mass gathering. When rapists abuse womanhood. What do we get instantaneously? 
Bone-chilling, stubborn, uncooperative silence.

Then bring on the candle marches, the protests, the huge lectures and campaigns on gender policing, racial abuse, rape and all the sins of the current society. Yes, people. The cause and thought is noble, commendable and I'm sure you standing there yelling "We want justice" whilst burning yourself with dripping wax from a wasted candle at an unconventional, inconvenient hour of the night will be appreciated by the victim fighting for its life on the hospital bed. But is it enough? No.

In all the feuds and rape cases which happened on a populated street, I would like to know how it would've been possible if a group of men would've gathered and beat them up in a gruesome way. How would the thought of rape even originate into their conciousness , if they had been brought up in a conservative family who propagated sisterly love and respecting motherhood?

It is our silence which has fed this, like dry wood to the flame of horror.

The fact is, ever since probably after India gained Independence, we have always depended on somebody after a moment of action. Half heartedly, illiterately voted in the elections, which is any day worse than not voting at all, and once the new Government is elected, we have our scapegoat. It is blamed for everything. We drink, we get girls drunk, we rape, we murder and it's the Government's fault. We've always had someone who takes the fall of our responsibilities. Not that they shouldn't. It's their job. We'd criticize them if they didn't do that as well. But every action, has an equal and opposite reaction, and our country is facing the adverse consequences of the reaction.

Because we have a readily available scapegoat, we have sunk into ignorance. In the earlier days when people saw a murder report or kidnapping in the papers, children were shut in the houses for days until the parents were convinced it was safe. Now, it has become a report for the side column of every newspaper, and the headline is some worthless politician with a penchant for fighting, strange language and a chappal.
Pretty soon, rape will not be an outrage. It'll be oh-so-normal. Why? Ignorance. 
Why is there ignorance? Because these scapegoats have been upholding the main ideal: Peace. We have been stuffed with the word "Peace" since we've been born. Our textbooks, our lectures, our role models, everything within the range of our hearing capacity propagates "Peace". Even our cartoons are mostly about how friends fight, but how they make up "peacefully" in the end.
The danger here, friends, is not peace being propagated. It's "So called peace" being propagated. We are afraid to fight because we're afraid to disrupt the normal flow of things with chaos. "So called peace"  is synonymous with ignorance, and imagine if we stuff a child's head with that, which we are by the way. The horror. 

When the French were frustrated with the Bourbons. When the Germans began to blame Weimar Republic. When Robespierre's rule was unbearable. What did they do? Sit quietly? Hope for peace?

No. They revolted.
Protested and argued for change with life as the ultimate prize. When demands were met with, and all was well, the people were saner than they ever were.

Crisis, people. Mortal crisis, We need one of those to shake us from this stupor of false safety. Crisis is what triggers fear, and fear compels our senses, our alertness and us to some pretty remarkable places. Maybe fearing a mass rebellion on the streets every now and then is risky. But eventual reality checks are important, especially when times worsen everyday. 
It is then that we rise from the ashes of the hollow our  self has been in. You can even interpret this in another way : If you don't stop ignoring, fear another revolution very soon. Because soon people will realize. So either we can educate and teach our young to be better, moral-respecting individuals, or we can watch the world we've built crumble down. I'm aware the former is harder.

Maybe disturbance of sorts is not so bad after all.
Let there be a miasma of chaos. A chaos that screams "Justice".

Let there be pandemonium.

The River Of Life.

" The River of Life overflows!
  I'm the silent spectator,
  Watching as it disappears,
  Into, the shadows

  The land glistens with it's mere droplets,
  Take the shape of maidens and men.
  Who pray by it, as it flows,
   Into, the meadows. 

  Oh, it has seen it all, oh, the omniscience.
  The prick of a needle, the prick of conscience.
  Friendships breaking, rivalry grow,
  As it flows, above the mountains and below. 

  Render it toxic, render it deadly,
  Try all you want, you can never be free.
  From the force of Life, and all it's shades, dark or mellow,
  As it trickles by Elysium and Dead's Gallow. 

  Age wrinkles face and many a pace,
  The pebbles no longer tremble,
  As the course pacifies.
  And the thrill doesn't suffice. 

  Unto it's final moments, as it converses with Death,
  As it rests, waves faltering, in the river bed.
  Watching with sandy visions, as the wind blows,
  The final essence of the River, carried away by it's shadows. "

The Anchor Of Life.

There was a girl standing at the door of 5E all those years back. She had a clear, white uniform, stiff and uncomfortable with starch, pink, metal rimmed spectacles which she found cool but actually looked weird on her, and short cropped hair tied back into a tiny ponytail. She wasn't short, but her low self esteem was like a hammer whacked on her head multiple times. It was what shortened her.

She didn't have many friends. She clung to one Class 4 acquaintance, who later on found some other friends and sat on the other side of the class. The girl was pretty much alone.
But she remembered one thing. When she had entered class earlier that morning, the backdrop was beautiful. The glass windows were refracting the streaming sunshine into millions of tiny little rainbow drops, which fell on the front desks and colored our boring, dull copy pages. There was some wild, untamed sunshine, which streamed in directly and hit the roof, painting the walls gold with flecks of dust glowing like fairy dust. She remembered my eyes going wide with beauty and her heart soaring high with happiness. She wanted to jump, she wanted to squeal with joy. The problem was, she wanted to share it with someone. And no one was there. The sight of a wooden table in the corner for company was enough to crush her dreams. 

Then she entered. A shy little girl with a ponytail. A ponytail. Great. They already had something in common.
She introduced herself as Natasha. Extremely shy with a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she existed in the oblivion the girl never could afford to.
She turned my head to look around the room. And there sat Natasha, next to a hyper girl who couldn't stop chattering animatedly, not bothering to look whether she had her listener's attention, which was clearly diverted. She smiled at  her wide eyed stalker.

The girl smiled back.
Wait. Did you expect her to go talk to Natasha or something? Like, hahaha, what even?! xD
Okay. Maybe that was the thing to do.
The girl didn't do that. She just sat there.
Maybe it was for the better.

They were soon adjusted in the new class and she had friends. Some girls she  doesn't talk to now, but used to love and look up to back then, and cordial relations with the rest of the girls. She was still pretty much a loner.

The magic begun in August. The first Sunday. Friendship day. The day everybody had hands filled with friendship bands and they boasted. The day friends were found crying in the washroom because "After NINE YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP, how could she forget my friendship band?! "
The day only ten or twelve colored strings tied out of formality adorned her arms.
She was sure today, she'd walk home with none, and smile sportively as her next door neighbor showed her wonderful bracelets and strings, all hallmarks of friendships made over the years. But Natasha changed that.

She walked into the class room early in the morning, came straight up to the girl with a bright yellow and red friendship band and tied it around her wrist. "Happy Friendship Day".

The girl stared for a while in astonishment and then brought out her own pile of friendship bands she had been secretly hoping to tie.  Wordlessly, she tied the band. Then meekly whispered a friendship day greeting.

Natasha probably didn't realize the magnitude of her gesture. She's probably reading this with a blank expression and then she'll laugh at how she had no idea about this, right now. 

Well. Class 5 got over. And the girl got over Class 5. Where everyone was crying in the bus at the prospect of leaving their beautiful class and lovely class teacher, the girl was the one person who wasn't. She tried hard to, but she couldn't.

The acceleration of Life and it's moments are best left not described, because comparing it to anything, even the swiftest rollercoasters in Wonderla and Disneyland, won't give you the inkling of the idea of its immensity. The rest of the years passed by like a blur of technicolor. Ladies and Gentlemen, I shall now skip directly to Class 9. 

The Interact Club was easily the biggest thing that had happened to me ever since I lost the Prefect Badge I loved. Yes. The girl had changed. Oh she had, She no longer cared. She knew who were there for her and who weren't. Her views, her perspectives. Her values. Her friends. Oh yes. She had friends.
Natasha was in the Interact Club with me. Someone I didn't know. Never knew. She too, had become a different person. Our stories however, varied. 
We got to know each other better. Something I had wanted since Day One. The girl I had heard so much about. Her sweetness, her character. I wished I had gone and talked to her that day.

But as time passed by, the illusions begun to crack. I no longer saw the perfect girl many envied. I saw someone who was trying just as hard to fit in as I once was. She wanted friends, she wanted support in times of trouble. She had people close to her, and most of them weren't right. For the first time in my life I realized I was wrong; Our stories did not vary. Her story was just stuck on some pages before mine.

I was on Page "Don't Care. Simply Glare." She was on "Everyone Cares.Everyone Stares". Not a surprise. She was always a slow reader. :P
Natasha is one girl I thought I had the fortune to play counselor to. Giving her my half baked advice and feeling a sense of accomplishment. Making her realize her hidden, untapped potential. She was also the one girl that proved all my assumptions wrong.

I wasn't the counselor here.

Her constant praise, her constant appreciation, I was taken aback. I read all of our chats and every single one of them spoke of a person that couldn't possibly have been me. She puts pressure on my weak points, on the confidence that still isn't there. And that brain which has been labelled "dumb" by some?
Well. It has a whole lobe of common sense.
She is Superwoman. Her super power is to make people feel better about themselves. Her "Sup" is something I look forward to every day, because someone is there to clean up all the shit my life spews after giving me false hope. Yes, I realize I shouldn't treat her like a toilet cleaner. I can't help it if she does it for free, right?

She listens to my boring stories and my dreams about oblivion and serendipitous incidents, even though she doesn't understand half of it. She sees herself as a tough nut to crack when it comes to beating people at speech and arguments. I see a butterfly's chrysalis. I just wish that someone, the correct force of Nature, helps her emerge out of the cocoon with colors as bright and blinding as the sunlight I love. The things she says sometimes? My eyes widen, like they had on the first day of Class 5.

Her drive, her determination will get her places. One day, she will step out of the oblivion her eyes live in, which she very boringly calls "her comfort zone", and rise like a beautifully composed......"cake".

This is exactly what happens when you run out of metaphors at 12 in the night.

She texts me one night and proudly tells me how she gave her name for Hindi Debate Anchoring, something which makes her legs tremble and her tongue stammer. The admirable part is, she knows she may screw up, but she is hellbent not to. She knows it's a baby step for the already talented, but for someone like her, it's a spark to dry wood, which will one day flame up and bring down buildings with its ferocity. 

The cool part of the flame will forever remain, the one you can pass your entire hand through, which solely exists to give light to the lives of the dark. To anchor not just a debate, but hope, encouragement, friendship, trust and appreciation.

To anchor "life".

 

Paper Boats 5

Thanks to inconvenient timing, you would find me not at school with the other kids, but sitting on my own porch , with my old art guru.

Unlike other kids, we didn't need to face the hardships of getting different chalk to work on mud. We had a proper slate with brand new chalk, a drawing book for sketching, a box of bright paint and horse hair brushes. The abnormal attraction between new things and the human nature got better of me, and while Guruji spoke to my mother, I idly twirled the pencils in my hand and made spirals on my exposed calf with the soft brushes.
Then he turned his attention to me. He surveyed me from top to toe, and exclaimed "Hello!"
A bit taken aback, I smiled nervously and in a barely audible tone I said "Hello, sir."
My mother shot me a disapproving look. What? He wasn't a big fan of Namaste!

He  cocked his head to one side and surveyed my sister and I, with wide eyes and just the curve of a smile. It amused him, perhaps, to see how much we had grown. My assumptions were confirmed when he shook his head with a slightly wider smile than before and said, "However much we think we're prepared, somehow Age finds ways of surprising us."
Yes, it did, indeed. We grew lean and tall, with more defined features and a distinct voice, the only fragments of our childhood forms remained in our minds, in faded old photographs. But he managed to remain exactly the same. How some things change, and some things don't.

We sat down and begun the class. He showed me the techniques he had once taught me, years ago, all over again. The way you use boring arithmetic signs to make a flower, and the simplest way to turn marks of sorrow, tears, were into blooming lotuses.
He gave my sister the same withering look he used to shoot her when she used to complete a drawing a two year old could have interpreted better. The only difference was, this time he looked at me and said, " She hasn't changed, has she? She still plays about like it's a joke." He shook his head sadly. "She...did not grow up"
When we started to draw the leaves, he had taught me that the veins look like a lot of aligned "V"s intersected by a line. He used to keep saying "bhee" instead of "vee", sleepily, as if drugged by the monotonous, repetitive sound, until you couldn't possible accommodate anymore "bhee"s.

At the end of every drawing, (satisfactory by his levels, or it's counted as a scribble), he used to gleefully fold up both his sleeves and pick up the pen to survey the one thing which was worth a thousand words. Then, with a flourish, he used to write "Very good!" and add his full signature, complete with the date, in the most sophisticated handwriting, in the fraction of a second.
Did I mention my sister didn't even get one of those?
It was as if just a few minutes had flown by when he was ready to leave. At last, he looked at my mother, shook her hand and said. "This place is very far from where I live. If they weren't old students, I would never have come. I felt obligated to come to your house, because once you start to pursue an art with a student, it's just not a class-it's a relation."
He left, and my eyes followed his silhouette in the slowly darkening evening sky.

On the day of our next class, our eagerness was cut short by my mother's anxious tone. The old man, while coming here, had become a victim of a heart stroke, and somehow his entire right side, was paralyzed.
My mother quickly took out our clothes. "Change. We're going to see him."
Astounded by my mother's determination, I asked her why.
Without looking at me, she said,"He said it himself. It just wasn't a class anymore, it was a relation. If he can come after all these years for his long lost relatives, we must do that as well."
My sister's half-baked, filmy magazine knowledge kicked in as a bonus. "A one sided relationship does not work." She added, smugly.
I shot my mother a look and snorted. She was giving her the all-too-familiar withering look. 

After a torturous one hour journey we reached his humble dwelling. The door was barely tall enough to let my mother in, and we crept in silently. He was lying there, his eyes were the only thing that acknowledged us as we entered the room.
I looked around and saw all his best paintings, cheaply framed, yet adorning the walls in a way the most expensive decorations could not. My eyes fell on his right hand, useless and contorted, which would never be able to draw again. 

He sighed. He knew he was old, and something like this was coming, but he hadn't known acceptance would be so hard. We accumulate wisdom over the years sometimes to share, sometimes to prepare ourselves for the coming worst. Yet, the work it does to cushion the shock is negligible.
As if confirming my assumptions again, he repeated with a pained smile. "However much we think we're prepared, somehow Age finds ways of surprising us."