Almost

As news of another School Kalolsavam arrived, she found herself remembering her life.

She was beautiful once, the kind of beauty that belonged in Malayalam magazine photographs of the seventies and eighties, soft focus portraits of women with jasmine in their hair and dreams in their eyes. She had talent too. But opportunities are not given equally, and hers slipped away before she learned how to reach for them. Marriage came early, followed by the slow closing of doors she had never known were open.

Her husband was a good man. He gave her shelter, stability, and a daughter who grew up carrying her mother’s beauty and a gift for dance that allowed her body to speak with grace and feeling. And so began the journeys. Mother and daughter travelled together under the midday sun to dance classes across the city. Sometimes they stopped at Patter’s Hotel near the beach, a small refuge where they shared a modest meal.

When School Kalolsavam season approached, the house transformed. Nights stretched into rehearsals. Together they stayed awake, mother and daughter, until movement became instinct and the daughter’s feet carried rhythm even into sleep. The mother sat at the edge of the practice space, watching. Every turn of an ankle, every graceful extension of an arm, carried within it the dreams she herself had once held.

On the night of the competition, she waited in the wings, invisible as mothers so often are, hands clasped, breath shallow. When the prize was announced and applause rose like a wave, a tightness within her eased. The next day, seeing her daughter’s photograph smiling back at her from the newspaper, she allowed herself a moment of pure joy.

After that, life returned to its familiar shape. The newspaper clipping was carefully cut and saved, pressed between the pages of a book no one else would open. The house settled back into its rhythms. She cleaned rooms that went unnoticed. She fed the fish circling their tank, the cats that came to her door, the dogs who waited faithfully. She scattered grain for birds in the garden and watered plants, watching them grow in ways she never had.

Now, as another School Kalolsavam approaches, she sits in her garden in the afternoon light, surrounded by cats and flowering plants, and she remembers.

They were the life she lived. They were enough, almost.