A tale of a mother and daughter!

Every moment of happiness or sadness is complimented by one person, the person can be a family member or a friend or just a passer by, a complete stranger.

I was on a trip to Singye Dzong (three days walk in the middle of no where) with my dad, I was taking a break from work but then at the same time I was looking for stories to take back home.

Well, yes I did find a lot of stories to write on along the way, on the second last day of my trip we were at Raemoteng, located on the north eastern side of Singye Dzong. Raemoteng is the summer home for the nomadic yak herders, although there is settlement there, the place is occupied only for about a month or two (guess summer is short for people living there).

A s I was taking a walk around the place, looking for something interesting to write about, I came across an empty house, a small house.

One of the yak herders started to tell me a true story that happened a few years ago, two years ago to be precise.

“An old blind lady and her daughter lived in this house; they didn’t have any yaks to herd that year so they decided to stay back while all of us left. A few days later, the daughter had got sick and died. When we came back after three weeks, there was no sign of the mother as well as the daughter.So we went to check on them, the old lady was sitting next to her daughter’s dead body, which had started to smell. She looked helpless and weak; she would have starved to death if we had decided to stay back any longer. Later the daughter’s dead body was chopped into small pieces and thrown to seven corners of Singye Dzong,” he narrated the story to me.

I seriously didn’t know what to say, tears just started to roll down my cheeks. I was told that later the old lady was adopted by another yak herder family. Only the old lady knows what she actually went through for three weeks.

Her dead daughter next to her, blind and helpless to do anything, nothing could get worse than being this helpless.

I wondered what this old lady might have gone through, all alone with her only daughter’s dead body next to her, with no food to eat and with no one around in the middle of no where. And yet she managed to survive, I was also told that she is still strong after all that she had to go through.