A PEACEFUL DEATH

When I go home, it is usual that we have family gatherings mostly led by ladies and the Head as our grandma. It is there where we exchange news from different streams, including the gossips of our native place. It was then I heard that Kuttappanchettan died.

     I couldn’t remember him at once. They cleared my doubt by streaming out the picture of ‘Kutti’. I knew her. The first old lady I have seen who had not worn upper clothes till her death. She called me, ‘Maale’ (she called the same my Mom too). We looked each other in confusion that who might be called out. At the age of hundred, she seems to be very energetic like a child. She cleaned the yard and cut vegetables faster than my Mom.

   I sat near her to hear the olden golden stories she explained with her toothless mouth. She came home every week and it was not at all for money. It was a reason for continuing her exercise to walk through the high mountains to breathe the nature. The fresh air made her begin a new day on each morning. While talking to her we could feel the positive energy that flows around her.

   It was very soon that I knew that she fell down and she was unable to continue her walks. On day, I heard her grandchild telling that there is a old material in a our home, if wishes come and take.. It might be a joke. Her children looked after well and I believed she can’t leave the nature. But she left one day.

  Kuttappanchettan was her son, who was our rubber tapper too. While the people surrounded me fell again into the depth of gossips, I went to our grandpa to know more of it. I haven’t known he was ill. It was a peaceful death. He liked jackfruit much more and had that fruit as a last wish. The only unfulfilled wish explained by his son was that he wishes to have beef curry as a side dish with jack fruit.

     After having his supper, he fell asleep and that sleep he continued even now in some other world. Somebody told me that we could feel that he was in deep sleep while looking at his body without his soul. He was very fast in doing all his works like his mother. That night, his mother might have come beside him to call him to be with her forever.

      As he had taken care of his mother well at her olden days; it’s time for his mother to take care of him without being an old property for others. When I returned, my grandma exclaimed: “What a lucky man he was.. God, let me also be gifted with that kind of a death”. Yes, all wish for a peaceful turning of heaven, but who all are gifted.