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impossible to cook because I used to cook for him; he loved delicious foods and I enjoyed cooking for him. Just to see him delighted was my delight. Now for whom am I going to cook?
"And I have never taken my meal before him. Even if it was very late if he had gone to some other village for some work, or to the court in a faraway town -- I had to wait the whole day, but it was a joy to wait for him. In sixty years of married life I have not eaten a single meal before him."
That has been a tradition in India: how can you eat unless the person you love and for whom you have cooked and prepared has eaten? Just the other day my mother was saying.... She told me that she had wanted to tell me before but could not gather courage to tell, that day she wanted to say it because it was like a heavy weight on her heart.
I said, "You should have told me before; if just by telling me that weight disappears, why should you keep it?"
She said, "l felt so ashamed to mention it to you, but I cannot bear it any more, for the simple reason that if any day I die, I will die with this heavy weight, so it is better I should tell it."
And what was the matter? The matter was nothing -- to the Western eye it is meaningless. The matter was this, that she had also never eaten before my father, but on the last day, when my father died.... She used to come from the hospital in the night and in the early morning she used to go back. She was just preparing tea before she went to the hospital, just about to take a cup of tea when the phone call came that my father's condition was serious, so without drinking the tea she went to the hospital. He was going up and down the whole day, so she completely forgot about eating.
By the evening my father was better. I went to see him nearabout three, and he was as good as one could hope -- and that was a dangerous signal because it always happens before a man dies that he becomes absolutely okay. When death is coming, somehow the whole life flame gathers together to face death as the last challenge. That's why before death people become almost cured. It is just like before a flame disappears from the candle: in that
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