Calendars, Timetables

A timetable is too binding for me. This is probably so for all free-spirited people. My psyche has a built-in clock and it needs no winding or battery and possibly it runs on solar power. My memory is excellent and I can remember my schedule, which is what a timetable keeps in an organized manner, with accuracy at all times. So, even the seductiveness of the modern gadgets escapes me. I never understood the need to scribble down every single detail of my known future activities on a calendar or an organizer to use a modern term. I’m more interested in the unknowable part of my future.

Having said I am not overly organized, I also envy people who are organized to a fault. Oh, how much envied those who even timed their babies’ birth to sync with the calendar. Let me explain. I have friends who wanted their kids to be born before the year ended, and labor was induced to make this happen if the baby took its own sweet time to be born. Often the reason behind this was, the kid to make the school cut-off date, which in most places is the last day of the year. Maybe if I too was diligent about recording everything on a calendar I too could have timed my children’s birth. I still managed to enroll my January and February born kids into a higher grade after they were tested and were certified as being ready though they had to go to a private K as the public schools are strict with respect to the Kindergarten.

For sure, one date I know that will be impossible to mark on a calendar is the date I will take my last breath on this earth. I don’t mean to sound morbid but a great deal of reality is morbid. Here is one proof. 

An acquaintance of mine is obsessive about recording everything on her wall calendar. I don’t know where else she duplicates these entries. From a distance her calendar looks ant-infested. I haven’t paid close attention as to what the entries are but I cannot imagine her calendar could be filled with important activities every single day of the week. She wasn’t even working anymore. Her profession used to be podiatry. She was my son’s classmate’s/possibly his soul mate’s mother. The fist time I met her was at my son’s and her daughter’s undergraduate college. We met but there was no instant connection and though a bit “fobbish,” she certainly came across as a nice person. Her daughter Shefa was a valedictorian while my son cruised along.

The next time I met Jawahara is the day I heard that Shefa had died in an accident in South America during her spring break. I heard this on April 1. My first reaction was, is someone playing April Fool’s on Jawahara and her family. Alas, this turned out to be not true.  As soon as I heard the news I rushed to Jawahara’s house as if she was my flesh and blood. I knew my son was close to her and him being out of town that day, I felt it my moral obligation to be near her. I had never seen a home plunged in such darkness. The lights shone bright but sorrow spoke the same language in every home regardless of the religion or customs practiced in that home. I had no words to console Jawahara, a fellow mother indescribably grief-stricken. Though she moaned like a slaughtered animal, I don’t think the reality of it all had yet struck her.  It’s not unusual for someone to not accept a loved one’s death until one sees the corpse. Even then you look for signs of life. I did when I saw my late father’s body laid out in an Ice box in the living room in my aunt’s house in India. The body was being preserved till I arrived from the US and then within a couple of hours it was carried to the crematorium.

Jawahara too wasn’t going to be convinced of her beautiful daughter’s tragic and untimely demise until the body was delivered to her.

After a few days, the family held an informal memorial for Shefa at her home before a more formal one at a church on a later date. This is when I noticed the calendar on the wall filled with activities, appointments, events and so on. This is when it struck me that that calendar could not have foreseen the day Shefa was to be snatched away from her loved ones or did it but just kept it a secret considering what a horrible event it was going to be?

At the informal memorial, as I sat in the living room, a yearly calendar was being passed around.  I was told it had been created by Shefa as a gift to her parents. Every page of the calendar contained a picture of the angelic-looking Shefa surrounded by members of her extended family on her last trip in December to India. March 31 smiled back at her ominously from  the page across.