“Do you know the meaning of your name?” Lipika asked. “I don’t know what it actually means

but Ma christened me with a quite exotic name. Isn’t it?” sassed Saga with a glimpse of tears in

her eyes. But the question today somehow sounded a bit jarring to her. She while coming back

home intruded herself many times that why could not she suffice this question? The little girl

started ferreting out the meaning of her name rather herself. “Had Ma been alive today.” she

blurted in her mind numerous times. Being a girl of twelve she hardly could get any beeline,

when her father entered her room. Coming across his agitated and restless baby he said,

“What’s the matter with you Saga?”

“Who am I? What do I mean?”

Father got tensed hearing these sort of quarries from his little girl.

“Tell me Baba, what does my name mean?”

“Story!” he enunciated. “You are the narration, the anecdote, the parable of life, my life, our

life, of your mother’s life.” She eventually became silent and calm. “Story?” said Saga. She

made her father understand that she was allayed then. He left the room with a little mark of

the antsy left on his forehead.

“Am I the life content of my mother? Am I? Do I portray my Ma’s both spring and winter?” she

could not tarry to think of these and keep smiling with utter beatitude and shading tears

missing her mother at the same time.

That night the dinner table was very soothing with a bit of woe, a very alloyed feeling Saga felt

for the first time. She unwrapped all the albums that contained the anamnesis of her with her

mother; how she giggled being on her mother’s lap, how her father grinned, the album

delineated everything. Saga of her own was chortling and laughing chewing the cud and her

mood was tardily turning into a jovial one from that of melancholic.

The very first photo that she smiled looking at was the first picture of her life on her mother’s

lap. She as well as her mother were looking at each other and everything else etiolated around.

Then she found one which doodled their first visit to the zoo where she was afraid to move

towards the cage of the tiger. Her father made her fear go down and she finally doughtily went

to see the Tigers holding her parents’ hands. Suddenly, she met the photo which witnessed the

first day of her school. She was in a tizzy when she left home but when she was to leave her

parents outside to sashay into the territory of her school without them, she made a balloon-like

face and cried bitterly. She, on one hand, tittered remembering it but on the other hand, she

thought, had she not been gullibly left her mother then for even that trivial time, she could

have spent a little more time with her. She could see in front of her eyes, her mother, cooking

for her, weaving sweaters for her. Actually, the memories which she thought to be her own

were mostly of her parents especially of her father which she heard while growing up and made

an imagination out of it which had become her own retentiveness.

“What is Ma doing here?” she questioned herself watching a photograph where her mother

was writing something and she found herself sitting beside her mother and looking at it with

rapt attention. “Baba managed to capture lives from the transient life of Ma.” she murmured.

She somehow managed to reminisce her mother’s fondness for writing stories and discovering

this fact she resolved the hush-hush behind the meaning of her name. She let out a sigh of

relief and felt blessed.

She felt extreme enthusiasm to recommence and pursue her mother’s dream and aspiration.

So, without lagging much she slobbered over writing a story as she wanted to be the

predecessor of her mother. Night went deeper, she kept on hovering over the topic she might

write a story upon. The dawn broke, she felt a pax on her forehead of her mother and finally

she sashayed into the new world of writing.

Saga started penning down her first saga.