The fifth place..

This post is a tribute to our dear cousin Goda ..the blog has been long overdue..she has been pervading my mind too often;

 It seems like yesterday..but a dozen years have passed by. Goda looked so good and true to life in my wedding album. My muse often hovers around her and those days of togetherness.

 We were a bunch of five like-aged and minded cousins who stuck to one another at all family gatherings and talked our hearts out at the sleep-overs. All of us shared a deep bond and to others chagrin,  we were reserving five seats next to one another at all the family gatherings. Goda was our sooth sayer of sorts  smitten with myths, prophecies and omens. She had us enraptured with her tales of yore and her eyes themselves spoke volumes.

 She had done all of us cousins  proud as the first one to have donned a white coat and sported a steth around her neck. A compassionate soul that she was, she had  immense faith in her profession . Her service as a doctor began at home when she had treated and nursed her grand mother through her last few days.

 She was again the first one amongst us to enter motherhood. We had visited her at the hospital when the cherubic baby boy, she had delivered,  had been roomed in. We were chiding her for not being party to another cousin's wedding slated a couple of days ahead. She had remarked 'Make sure you have the fifth seat reserved and miss me !'. We missed her for the wedding and......... we missed her forever.  Her demise, when the family was at the behest of another wedding left all of us shell shocked.

 She was all in one - a loving mother,daughter,wife, sister, neice, granddaughter and cousin. A promising doctor intending to go miles saving lives, had lost her own to a brief fatal attack of Asthma. Her last glimpse of a proud mom , managing to smile through the nebuliser is eternally locked in our hearts. 

 She has lived beyond her own prophecies and within us till abyssmal depths. 

 Dear cousin, we still have that fifth place reserved for you.......Fathom, we cannot!