For You, Baba

I have been meaning to write to you, to confront your loss and my pain in a manner befitting the person who you were. I toyed with the medium and language of communication and wondered if this should be a letter or a meaningless scrap when it dawned that all the thinking and rationalisation and memory-sorting detracts from the spontaneity. How could that be a tribute to a free, impulsive spirit?

I have never held a kaleidoscope in my hands and have, for the most part, fancied it to be a glass-mirror encrusted, ratchety tube coloured in gaudy strips of mauve and pink. When a little girl puts it to her eye and clicks rapidly from one frame to another, her teeth biting down hard on her lower lip and then her lips parting into a guileless perfect “O” - I think of you…and me…and the frames that keep us together. Some of those frames memories are in stark black and white, some tinted sepia. Only recent ones are in bright Eastman color. The little girl is in pigtails and dungarees. She has a light fever and her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are bright, too bright perhaps because of the fever or perhaps touched by the flavour of the lives she glimpses briefly. The kaleidoscope is like a time capsule that has taken the most enduring emotions and squeezed them into this tiny physical space - the magic is almost palpable and the effect on the little girl surreal.

Because, no-one really wants to grow up and I am still walking by your side, my hand tiny in your firm grip, feeling warm inside as you regale yourself with stories from your childhood.