Just thinking about you

Every cloud has a silver lining! If anyone would asked me a few weeks back if Cancer could have the proverbial silver lining I would have yelled out a big NO! How wrong I would have been. Being incancerated has huge silver linings that warm you and dazzle you more than the brightest ray of sunshine! It took me some time to share with the ones that make my world the terrible news that had befallen on me. First it was a few friends, then a blog restricted to those very few friends, then some understated allusions on my main blog and to my pwhy family: loved one, not well etc. Then one fine day I decided to say it loud and clear: my husband had cancer. That day the clouds parted and my world was filled with sunshine. I was humbled by the amount of goodwill, love, positive thoughts and support that engulfed like the softest and yet strongest real and virtual avalanche. From every corner of the world people reached out to me, even people I had never met but knew because of project why. It almost seemed like project why had been created more than a decade ago by the big picture God my father had introduced to me when I was a child and was hurt in some way or the other. Pa always said that the hurt was for good reason in the big picture that God only sees. And as a little girl I believed in that God with all my heart. That God did not have a face, or a name. Today I call it the big picture God! This picture is Utpal wearing his Hanuman mask. Let him become the face of the big picture God.

So this big picture God sees the big picture, and just has he saw the big picture of this little child before he fell into the bubbling pan and charted the course of his life so that he could be with us today, he must have seen Ranjan's cancer and got busy filling the orphaned only child's world so that she would not be alone when cancer struck. And it was not just the project why family, but a new family that took seed the moment the news was known. My A team, with even a Doctor who sees with his heart!

When I get up every morning at some unearthly hour as sleep deludes me, I switch on my computer and am always greeted with mails from all across the world. What is touching is that many of the people who send these mails, I have never met. One of today's mail was most touching: Hi Anou,

 Just thinking about you. How is hubby doing ? Love. 

Then before everything else I have to send an update to two wonderful people who normally sleep late and thus wake up late, but wake up at the ping of my mail and send me a message filled with love. Were it not for my incanceration I would have never been blessed by the love of these exceptional souls!

As the news spread, my extended family which had become estranged for some reason or the other, more so I guess because my only child status made me a sort of a self sufficient happy recluse, came from every part of the city and across the world. Every single one from the oldest (90+) to the youngest offered their blessings, love and support. We recalled old memories, those that had made us laugh till we cried and realised that in time of need all was forgotten.

The big picture God, the one that has no colour, no religion, no form and no prescribed rituals is a great chap. I know that he has charted the next months with the same spirit as he charted the past years.

I can only say: Chapeau Bas!