Repaying the Debt of Smiles Past

Some mornings feel like a quiet accounting of the life we have lived.

This morning, before the world had properly woken up, I was lying beside my son, running my fingers through his hair. The slow, careful way you touch a sleeping child when you don’t want the spell to break. He has been on medication, breathing unevenly the way children do when the weather turns against them. Another allergy. Another small battle his body is fighting.

A kilometre and a half away, in a hospital room full of loud white light, my wife is fighting pneumonia.

Life has a way of arranging these scenes without asking us first.

…

The mind, when it is worried, rarely stays in the present. It travels. Mine travelled back to the second Covid wave. Those long forty-odd days when my wife was in the hospital and I existed between phone calls, oxygen numbers, and the stubborn hope that she would come home. There were nights when I truly did not know if she would.

And yet she did.

Life returned to its ordinary rhythms. Work. School mornings. Telling each other the strange dreams we had seen the night before. The small arguments that belong only to people who share a life.

…

I turned forty-six earlier this year. Somewhere along the way I have realised something about happiness. And about sadness.

Happiness has always arrived for me slightly tinged with sadness. Even in its brightest moments there is a faint awareness that this too is passing. That the laughter, the sunlight, the quiet warmth of someone I love sitting beside me — all of it will someday dissolve.

Sadness, on the other hand, is pure. It does not pretend permanence. It simply arrives, sits beside me for a while, and slowly merges into me.

Perhaps that is why I try to hold small, insignificant moments a little longer than they deserve.

Long before social media arrived, I used to send SMS messages to friends telling them what I was doing in that moment and asking the same in return. A tiny status update on life.

Maybe that is why I was drawn to writing and image-making, to capture something that will never come back again.

The calm of dust motes floating in a stream of sunlight.

The quiet immensity of a sleeping child’s heart under my palm.

My wife’s voice on the phone saying she is feeling slightly better. Weak, but better.

…

We never really know what is around the corner.

And yet we live as if we do.

We make plans for next summer. We postpone joy for calmer days. We tell ourselves that life will eventually settle into something predictable.

There are lines from a Gulzar song I often return to:

Muskuraoon kabhi, toh lagta hai, jaise hothon pe karz rakha hai. (Whenever I smile, it feels as though a debt has been placed upon my lips.)

I thought I understood it. But some mornings are a refresher course in meaning.

Life has collected its dues before. It probably will again. That seems to be part of the arrangement.

But still, when my son sleeps beside me in the quiet morning, and my wife is fighting her way back to health in that hospital room a kilometre and a half away, I find myself doing the only thing I know how to do.

Living.

Holding the small sharp shards of joy carefully in my hands.

Smiling a little.

Even if life is keeping count.