Obituary of an Incomplete

She remained one unfinished right uptil the end.
Maria Amir was the oldest seven year old that ever lived.

She told stories for a living. A carefully compiled collage of fantastic images and fragrant notions, carved into golden magic pots. There are some who say that by the end she had begun to cope with some semblance of reality, they are wrong. Reality had never been privy to her thoughts or her aspirations. It was the one precept and notion that always remained on the peripheries of her immense vocabulary. But was never invited in for tea.
I will remember her always, in incomplete sentences and unfinished thoughts. Lifelines that she left lingering mid-phrase and mid-gesture for us to carve whichever way we chose. Her classroom was always a pallette of impressions. We will never know if she was the painter or the paint, that we brushed onto the blank canvases that she laid out for us every Tuesday at 10 am. Maria dreamed of beauty with a dedication yet unparalleled. It was her one mission in life: to find magic. In art, in love, in pain and in humanity. Which is the reason why she always lived in halves. The magic needed to be complete for her to embrace it and it never was.
Once, over a cup of coffee and a consolation for not making the Dean's merit list, she told me that life could be summed up in an "If only" and an ellipsis. It was an unfortunate proclamation to have made, for it framed her destiny. A duplicitous series of "what ifs" were to mark her lifelong trajectory.
She was never one to be at ease in a crowd. Which is why when she stood at the podium in class, she never looked any of us in the eye. She spoke mostly to her multiple selves and we were always honoured to be included in such a select sphere. When she was seven, she told us, she had presumed that 'crowds' were merely a large composite of pixies. But it became harder to keep up the pretence over the years, when they started acting too much like people.
I will always remember her as a dreamer who inspired other dreamers. She was a shepard of only lost flock. Perpetually preaching to us, with polemics that painted the grandeurs of being lost. She always said that it was the journey to the point you wanted to get to, that needed magic, and that the prize point was only there for you to take those steps.
She loved junk food, coke and cartoons with fervour. Maria always said that an animated Disney feature could fix any form of depression imaginable. She relished her loneliness and concepts of kinship, which were something she never could quite reach. I remember her saying once, " Family could be good ... for those who like that sort of thing. Perhaps, around the holidays?" Maria believed, blindly, that laughter could cure anything. That a safe corner, a good book, someone to make you laugh when you needed it most and an honest dream, were the only gateways necessary for majesty.
She peeked her way through the million keyholes and half opened doors of our lives. It was never "How's school going, Jim?" ....with Maria it was "Do you think Jim, that Melville actually sampled an apple-dumpling in comparison to other foods before he condemned it as the in-road to hell on a bad stomach?" That- or some equally inane tangent- was how she said hello. That was her keyhole.
Her curiosity was colossal, as was her phobia of commitment - for anything. Which is why she only ever spoke and thought in halves and quarters. She could make you feel like the most special person in the world with a single sentence, but never quite managed to couple it with a good enough follow up.

Maria never married. But she insisted right till the end that she was waiting for a tall prince, dressed in white, with green eyes and a pixie laugh. She said that she was waiting for lightening to strike. That she was always ready for it. Had been for a while now...
It struck at precisely 7:20 am on a rainy Saturday morning in St Mary's , New York. She was 71 years old when her ever-hopeful heart sighed its last.

I got stuck in traffic on my way to the hospital that day and came in to find Dr Shah crouching over the corner bed by the window. He covered her face with a white hospital sheet, turning around to look at me with a whimsical smile.
"Well she did say that she wanted to go on a rainy day. I think she mentioned that it would help with her prize rendition of Gene Kelly! Going out, my style, she called it."

Dr Shah was handsome for his age and he was a good head and shoulders taller than I. I now recall Maria telling me that us short people were made this way so we wouldn't catch bypassers in the eye and be forced to make senseseless conversation on street corners. As I took in his soft smile and his crisp white lab coat, I couldn't help but wonder if he felt it too. The stark white room seemed to lose colour somehow- colour and flavour.
Dr Shah must have noticed that I was having a rather hard time working at - what she had always called - my 'He-man' face, because he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered "I know. This one was special, wasn't she?"

As I looked up at him I noticed something. Dr Shah's eyes were a bright, bottle-green.

"Yes, she was."