To mom, with love

She was a college lecturer. Our father says she was the most popular of them all. He recalls how there would be a flock of students and friends to see her off when he went to pick her up during weekends. We sketch a mental picture of his old Ambassador car parked under the trees, he waiting a bit impatiently for his newly-wedded wife, she arriving a wee bit late with her coterie, saree with an unmatched blouse, hair swept up in a becoming coiffure – that was how the old sepia-toned photographs showed her to be. Our mother, who is the protagonist of this little piece of writing, does not comment. She has never been the one to blow her own trumpet. So finally, I thought we would do the toots for her today.

We never truly understood why she gave up her career. Of course we are familiar with the circumstances that led to it because we were primarily the cause, although passive and oblivious (please regard how I don’t use the word “silent” – rumor has it that we had quite lusty cries). We were premature born and had gotten ourselves entangled in each other’s umbilical cords (forever it might seem) – another rumor has it that at least one of us resembled our arboreal kinsman rather than a human baby. The hastened delivery is, by the way, attributed to a train ride where our ever-solicitous father got down from a first class cabin in a lungi with two rupees in his shirt pocket searching for boiled drinking water to give to his pronouncedly pregnant wife and the train left the station without him. Because of timely intervention of two attentive and conscientious station masters, our mother and her luggage, both internal and external, could be safely disembarked at the next station, where she reunited with her lungi-clad husband after a not-too-long wait in a not-too-comfortable waiting room. Perhaps due to the virtue of our mother’s equanimity in dealing with the situation, we didn’t pop out immediately, but the stress might have had an effect on our premature birth.

Anyway, she never went back to teaching. She had an ever-getting-transferred husband, two needy children who always wanted the same thing at the same time (even the same breast to suckle on!), and loving but dependent parents-in-law. Her saga of motherhood started there and – well, motherhood never ends.

From a daughter’s point of view, she is a dream mother to have – a patient listener to woes real or imaginary, a healer of wounds, a firm hand while meting out justice, with a mind as broad as the skies above, there was nothing that we couldn’t tell her when we were growing up. She believed in our fantasies, had faith in our dreams, and never wanted us to be anything that we were not. She taught us everything – from nursery rhymes to table manners, from solar system to malayalam poems, honesty to discipline. She taught us that this world would be a more beautiful place if we believed in the goodness of people. She taught us how to love.

Now, she is our best friend – a great sodoku partner, a wonderful walking buddy, the most huggable person in our world. We are still needy. We still run to her for real or imaginary woes, and she dries our tears. As I said, motherhood never ends.