On Wed 13 Aug, 2025, I received a surprise message from Kalpana. With a request. For Sudha.
After a brief exchange and acceptance, I received a most unexpected and heart-warming comment from Kalpana. 🙏❤️
The following is my short birthday memory-message to Soot.
2025
Dearest Sudha, Sooty, Soot ...as they say, "A rose by any other name"....
but then, you are not a rose, are you?
You Are Magic.
At 14, I moved to JB - my 5th school in a relatively short, young life. Isolated from family except for one truculent dad and not looking forward to yet another insertion into stranger territory while battling my less than gregarious spirit.
And then my dad did me a favour beyond his reckoning: he got me a place on a bas sekolah that changed my life. I don't remember who was first seated in the bas sekolah - you or me. I do remember your surprising fascination with my utterly untrendy rubberband bangles. And I do remember I was besotted ... for the first time in my life.
During the early days in those languorous, early mornings on the school steps before school started, I was not infrequently spirited away by a "kind" soul who would advise and admonish me that I was spending too much time with you. Exclusively. I was told, "for my own good", that it was not a good thing to expend so much of my free time with you alone. "What will happen to you if Sudha should be ill on some days and you have no one else?"
Well meaning as that may have been, they did not know that I would have weathered any threats of future disasters and/or isolation for the sheer pleasure of having found one such as you. That my world was funnier, brighter, happier, fuller, more whole ... for the pleasure and comfort and delight of having you as a special friend.
None of us knew then, but our physical time together in this life, was never meant to be long and unbroken. We had but a few short years and then Life would take us on our own journeys. Our biggest joys and tribulations, our highest happiness and deepest sorrows would all be undertaken apart.
When I first met you, you were an awkward, gangly, heavily bespectacled girl with an unmistakable head of frizzy hair. But already with a secret, buzzing, sparkling, magnetic Magic inside of you. In the intervening years, you have bloomed and grown into a highly competent, unashamedly confident, attractive beauty - surrounded by a Life and family that is surely the envy and role model for many a person. A gloriously, devoted, intelligent, funny, kind husband who is worth a hundred times his weight in diamonds (eyebrows or no); beautiful, immensely talented, and beautiful daughters whose kindness of hearts are surely a constant joy and pride to you.
In the last couple of days since Kalpana's request, as I thought about you and of all the intervening years and of all the wonders now populating your life, I realised how much of what you now have is because of you - because of the Magic of you. You are the fulcrum and the nucleus of your family - the magical point that holds everything together and around which the beauty of your family and friends gravitate and dance in attendance to.
And while you and I, in this life, are separated by years, time, distance, experience, pains, joys ... when I think of you, I still see the Magic that is uniquely you. And I am enriched, always, with the thought of you.
Happy Birthday, Sooty. My heart soars for your treasures, your joys, your happinesses.
A video to accompany the above message. The music (though copyrighted) by Lady Antebellum, has personal significance that you may remember 🥰 too, Sooty.
