In a world where a brand name makes instant recognition not just easy but also inevitable, Neena Verma’s book “A Mother’s Cry, A Mother’s Celebration” comes riding on honest emotion and little else. To a generation unmoved by a widow’s tears, it is barely a surprise that Verma’s book has had to wait for its niche readers.
But once you do pick up the book, it is well nigh impossible to put it down without having a moist eye. She talks of the loss of her 22 year old. She writes with touching honesty about her drive from her workplace to the hospital knowing her son was no more. She writes too of the people who connected silently, those whose eyes understood her grief. Verma writes honestly about those too who attended the funeral as a social compulsion. Yet, today, she says, “I have no complaints about anything. People did what they deemed appropriate. We are not trained to handle grief.”
This profundity of thought comes from her training in applied sciences. As she reveals, “I have been working in grief and trauma space. My understanding of grief has changed. It has become more profound” after the passing away of her son Utkarsh, the day he secured admission to a prestigious university.
All too much to take for anybody, the Verma family was no different. While the father fumbled for words, his eyes gave him away as he stood near the staircase of the hospital waiting for his wife. The mother internalised the grief, or cried within, as she says.
Some people around wanted her to express it all through a loud wail. She preferred though to sob quietly. It was her way of handling her grief. The son going away left the mother orphaned. It is something she wishes no mother has to undergo.
“I had not had much of life coaching before this happened,” she says after having been prodded by her close friends to express her sorrow through her pen. Writing proved cathartic in many ways. And slowly, through a mix of poetry and verse, “A Mother's Cry....” took shape.
The book had a soft launch recently at a local gurudwara with the Verma family believing that it is the way their son, Utkarsh, would have liked it. After all, he liked to shared goodies with the poor and the orphan on his birthdays rather than hanging out with his peer group in a restaurant late into the night. As Verma says, he had a Sufi spirit.
The book is likely to have a discussion at the upcoming Delhi Book Fair too. Verma, who is an applied behavioural scientist, and a former student of Sri Ram College of Commerce and Delhi School of Economics, has forgotten not those who helped her handle her moment of grave challenge.
She thanks the policemen who first chased when she was driving rashly in a bid to rush to the hospital, then understood her plight and dropped her at the hospital themselves. She remembers too an unknown woman who held her strong when she stood there by her lifeless son.
It is with tokens of gratitude that she pens her words. Slowly, gradually they become an ode to life.
