The Frame

On her ninth birthday, Roshena’s father gifted her a photo frame, knowing her habit of photographing anything thing to everything that caught her fancy. It wasn’t a very costly gift but still it looked good. It was silvery gray in color, with some petals and leaves forming symmetric patterns on the corners. After receiving it as a gift she placed it at the right corner of of her messy study table, and also ended up cleaning up the weeks old clutter of photographs, books and stationary, but that wasn’t the hard part. Now she had trouble deciding which photograph to put in that frame.

She browsed through all her collection of photographs. There were photographs of frogs jumping, at times jumping to catch their prey which also was in the snap, or there was some stray dog sleeping at the edge of a pavement that almost every feet of the people going to and fro almost landed on him, or few photographs of  new born of a sparrow  or of numerous other animals or birds that came in the vicinity of her house. There were also many snaps of the people who frequented their home. Some were eating in those snaps, some were talking, blowing their nose, trying to smile at her, or just turning their eyes hoping to beat the camera. She browsed through them all, but couldn’t  zero upon anything.

The frame remained empty for few days. Now she tried to think of things important to her, so that she could take a snap and fill the frame. She though of her family, but there was no way she could take a snap of her family as her mother had died some six years ago, when she was only three. Only thing she vaguely remembered of her mother was her smell, which she also doubted at times.

One day gathering some courage she asked her father about her mother, hoping to steer the conversation onto some family photograph. She asked him what does he remembers of her mother. After a long pause, he replied that she had long hair and her handwriting was very good. An unusual way of remembering someone but still it made her think. She didn’t ask anything further.

Sitting on her study table she tried to smell herself after browsing through her notebooks. She had a good handwriting, which made her feel happy. A soothing calm settled onto her. Now she tried very hard to remember more of her mother, but nothing came. She could visualize a vague laughter, but wasn’t sure if that was of her mother’s. She closed her notebooks and went to her bed to lie down, as if hoping to get a dream of her mother. She stayed there, her eyes closed, for some time, with once in a while checking the clock. It was getting close to six, her father’s jogging time.

Just then there came the sound of the main door bolting.  She got of the bed and moved towards her fathers room. Carefully, making sure not to disturb anything. Now she stood standing in front of a huge cupboard, contemplating whether to open it or not. She checked her watch and then opened the cupboard. After browsing through few things she found a photo album but the photos were of the trip that she and her father went last year.

Now her attention turned to two closed boxes at the back. She took them out and opened them. There were few old photographs there, three-four had her father with some lady. She tried hard to recognize the face but no memory came back. She browsed through the remaining photographs, hoping to find a photograph of the three together. But there was none. Now came a photograph of her father with another lady, both were laughing in there. She checked more and found another one. The laugh looked familiar to her mother’s. She checked the earlier photographs again and then the new ones and then the old ones again.

Time was running fast, she knew that as she had been checking her watch regularly. Confused she put one photograph each of the two ladies aside.

After closeing the box she opened the second one. The box had some jewelry and few pages. The pages were few letters from her mother to her father. She looked at the handwriting, and felt happy as the handwriting was indeed very good.

Her father was now about to come anytime. She wondered which letter to keep back. Not sure how to choose one, she starting checking the beginnings and the ending, where her mother had written the date and her name respectively. Suddenly one date caught her attention, the letter was written on her ninth birthday. Feeling happy she took the letter out. Ninth birthday, she wondered. How could that be? Slowly she checked her watch, it was five minutes past the time her father used to come back. Scared she looked back, and there he was standing near the window looking outside.