MemoriesAugust 25, 2009 11:55 am

Remembering My Mother

My Mother seems so far away from me,
On that beautiful white shore across the sea.
Yet I remember love’s soft glow upon her face,
And the feel of her touch and tender embrace.

When I am weary from the burdens I’ve borne,
And the path is unclear and I feel so forlorn,
I remember her loving support was always near,                                                               
And her advice made the path ahead seem clear.

When I feel there is no one who seems to care,
Or when the heartache seems too hard to bear,
I remember how she always stood by my side,
And would tenderly wipe away the tears I cried.

When there are moments of great joy and pride,
And I wish my Mother was standing at my side,
I remember she saw more than I thought I could be,
And know I owe my triumphs to her belief in me.

When I reminisce about the things she used to say,
And I miss her and think she is so far away,
I remember what she gave lives on through me,
And one day I’ll see her on the shore across the sea.

Belinda Stotler

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MemoriesJuly 29, 2009 1:14 pm

This Night, That Night : A Moonscape

I looked at the sky as I walked in the quiet neighbourhood. The sky was clear except for a few  creases of clouds near the slice of moon,  the dull glow of the moon illumined the furls of clouds - the muted tones of the moon gave a faint and haunting shimmer to the night sky. The night was very  similar to the many night skies I had watched as I stood outside my parents’ house.

One particular night I recall, almost thirty years ago, when I stood waiting for my father who got delayed because he was visiting his uncle. I rested my chin on the gate warmed by the afternoon sun, looking at the end of the road that was dimly lit by a sodium vapour lamp. I counted ten and willed my father to materialize at the end of the street, though many tens passed I did not panic at my father’s absence. The night was far too beautiful, the steely beams of the moon touched the coconut leaves, open terraces, windows, and my long eyelashes as they drooped in tranquility.

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MemoriesDecember 25, 2008 12:44 pm

Loitering Further . . .

Days got wrapped up early, my father said, when he was eight years old.  A day began at sun up and got over at sundown, the span of the day was defined by the light hours.  Supper was cooked as early as 4 o’clock in the evening and the kitchen was cleaned as the western skies put up a scarlet show before the inky blue blurred into dark grey. The most important job for the evening was lighting the lanterns. About five lanterns called the Hurricane lamps were lit and placed at various rooms, other than these there were kerosene lamps that were placed at soot filled corners and triangular crevices on the wall in strategic places to cast a glow on the passages. Pazhani, the school peon who caried home in the evenings my grandfather’s files and books, would find my grandmother with the lanterns. He offered help.  

Pazhani took the glass lanterns out to the thinnai. He cleaned the soot from the glass that settled like a thick cloud, trimmed the wick, filled kerosene in the lanterns, lit the wicks  and kept the flame low. He then took the lanterns to various rooms and left them there. It was my father’s job at sunset to gently turn the knob to push the wick out and the flame burnt brighter. My father ran from room to room bringing light into the house. 

Just then my grandmother called Pazhani to the spare room to give her a hand in pulling the rolls of beddings stacked over the large iron trunk. My grandmother who was frail and smallbuilt appeared dwarfed before the stack of bedding. Pazhani, naturally, being a kind hearted man, offered help again. He dusted the bed and the sheets in the courtyard, lay the reed mats on the floor, placed the beds on them, spread the sheets and tucked them in neatly. My grandmother was anxious that he finish this fast and leave early as her husband did not know that Pazhani was delayed here after his duty in school. She knew that there was still time before her husband returned from school, he came close to sunset, his long shadow falling on the cobbled stones outside the door way.

As soon as my grandfather returned he washed his feet, hands and face with the water stored in a brass gangalam at the mitham. He then went up changed into a fresh veshti, and with angavastram thrown over his bare torso, he came down. My father who was playing on the streets with his group of friends was summoned for dinner. My grandmother served dinner for my grandfather and father and then ate hers. She collected the left-overs in a banana leaf and placed them on the thinnai outside, after covering it with another leaf. The ra-pichaikaran who went from house to house collecting food, would come much later, pull the leaf into his large aluminum thooku to share the food with his family who waited at the street corner under the lamp post.

My grandmother heaped the empty dishes in the mitham for Thayee to scrub the next morning. With the next chore in mind she went to the kitchen. She sat on her haunches facing the kumiti that had burning coal embers. She fanned the embers that turned a bright orange at the edges but remained cool blue at the core. She carefully padded her hands with rags and carried the hot kumiti to the room just outside the kitchen. She kept the kumiti below the oil lamp that was placed in a triangular recess in the wall. She brought the vengala pannai that contained milk, placed it on the kumiti and covered  the pot  with a plate. She then dimmed the lamps in the kitchen worrying about having them turned over by rats. Like all days she prayed that there shouldn’t be any accidents in the night. She closed the door, reached for the iron chain that hung from the top of the door and fastened it on the loop that was set on the wall above the threshold. She slid a ladle into the loop to keep the chain in place and protect her kitchen from the prowling black cat that wanted to break in to feast on her curd and the rats that ran freely all over the kitchen . She dimmed the lanterns in all the rooms and went outside and sat on the thinnai to catch up the day’s gossip with Brogijatha Ammal , a middle aged widow who lived next door  with her son Ambi.

On certain days Brogijatha Ammal took her time to keep the nocturnal rendezvous with my grand mother because her son Ambi who worked in the office of the Karyakartha of Govindaraja Perumal Kovil came home late. On those days my grandmother kept a watch on her son who played on the streets with his group of friends. She called out to him – Mali ,don’t hide in the dark corners. There might be insects there. Mali, don’t jump from the wall, you have just eaten a full stomach. My father had no ears for any thing, he concentrated on dodging the wiry framed Vasan who was determined to catch him.

My grandfather retired upstairs to his room to look through his files and read books.  Cool breeze blew from the open windows, the starless night hung outside like a dark blanket, flowing into the room to spill into the corners where the light from the lantern could not reach. An eesal bearing the tidings of rain bombarded desperately the lantern, losing its butter- paper wings. The heat of the glass singed the insect and it curled and fell on the wooded table. There were more of them, offering themselves as sacrifices on the altar of fire. My grandfather dimmed the light and waited as the insects were eaten by the fat lizard that had made its home behind his deceased cousin’s large photograph that was hung on the eastern wall.

It was after ten minutes that my grandfather resumed his work. His eyes were sore with long hours of work through the day. He waited for the cues that would end his day. Sharp at eight o’clock ra-pichaikaran came rattling a spoon on his plate. That was when the people retired for the day, closing their doors, relegating the ownership of the quiet street to the pichaikaran and his family. 

My grandfather heard his wife calling his son back home for the day. He heard the heavy  door being closed, he heard the patter of his young son’s feet on the floor as he ran about the house unable to stall the energy that coursed through his small body. In a brief while, his son would come up carefully bearing a shombu of hot milk spooned liberally with sugar, a layer of cream trembling on the surface. Mali would wait for his father to finish the milk, searching on the walls and the ceiling for the lizard that frightened him so much and kept him away from his father’s room.

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MemoriesDecember 23, 2008 9:01 am

Loitering With Intent

My father said that during his early years in Kumbakonam there was no electricity. His father woke him up as early as five o’clock and sent him packing to the banks of the river Kaveri before the crack of dawn. My grandfather followed a little later carrying a brass pot and a spare dhoti and angavastram. While my father croggily picked his way through the darkness, the hair in his arms standing out in the chillness of the morning, a few of his friends joined him en route. The group of boys headed to their haunt behind the temple that sat close to the water. They climbed up the gopuram and dived into the river splashing water and breaking the silence of the morning. They swam along the river to a distance carefully keeping clear of the currents and whirlpools. 

My grandfather washed his clothes and had bath. Just at dawn when the sky broke into a riot of purple, standing in knee deep water, he faced east and performed his prayers that ended with the japam of the Gayatri. He collected water in the small brass pot to perform abhishekam to the vigrahams in his private temple at home. As he walked back home he recited slokas, pausing near the temple to call out to his son to hurry back home to get ready for the school. Just the way my father was reluctant to go to the river in the early hours of the day, he was reluctant to leave the river and go back home. 

The sun fell on the pearls of water on the bare skin of my father, he had stripped and had a quick bath after perfunctorily washing his clothes. He wore the wet shorts and slung the wrung shirt on his shoulder. His hair stood out in spikes and he ran back home leaving a wet trail on the road. 

My grandfather who was the Headmaster of Banadurai High School, was an voracious reader. He had an enviable collection of books in his room on the first floor. My grandmother and my father did not disturb him when he retired to his room. After his shombu of coffee in the morning, he spent two hours in his room reading. Bright rays of the morning sun slanted through the eastern windows in his room and the two hours that he spent reading was important for him because he came back from school close to sunset and could not read for long hours in the jaundiced light of the lantern that my grandmother lit for him.

Sharp at nine o’clock in the morning, my grandfather wearing a clean veshti and a sparkling white shirt, an angavastaram slung on his shoulder, descended from his room. He had hot rice kanji, he then wore his turban, took his bag and walked up to his school. His students from the Mutt street walked at a distance behind him. After my grandfather left, my father took his time to get ready. He would suddenly realize that he is late, he will shout to his mother to get him the kanji, gulp the scalding liquid and run to school just in time to join his friends for the morning prayers.

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Memories, RelationshipsSeptember 19, 2008 3:46 pm

Bond Across Realms

Today Malaya tarpanam was performed by my brother for my parents. I felt the fragrance of their presence close to me the whole day. I went to Vasanth Vihar, J. Krishnamurthy Foundation and spent an hour there. As I sat at the Study, leafing through a book and intermittently looking at the large tamarind tree from the window, I thought that people who are very close remain connected across realms of life and death. We never really let go people we are fond of.

Our tradition makes us believe that we walk in the shadows of our ancestors. I invoke my parents and my grandparents during prayer time every day, besides remembering them several times through the day. Similarly my son pauses and remembers my parents before he leaves for school everyday. They go to make the pantheon of our  personal gods.

A Note On Malaya Paksham

We perform certain karmas to remember and honour our ancestors, as ancestors along with the devas and gods go to fill the landscape of our belief system. We perform two types of kaaryas – the deva kaaryas and the pithru kaaryas. The first is performed through bhakthi by way of homams and yagaas; the second is performed with shraddha , and hence called shrardam or tarpanam. Tarpanam is performed on the ammavasai day of every month, the shraddam is performed annually on the thithi of the deceased (the father or the mother). Tarpanam is performed on another occasion too, during the period of Malaya Paksham.

Malaya Paksham is the fortnight after the paurnami, the period when the moon wanes, in the month of Purattasi. This period  is also called the Pithru Paksham because we offer tarpanams for deceased parents and to all the ancestors.

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MemoriesSeptember 12, 2008 9:56 am

A Rose For The Lost Souls


An old man came to my office today. He was agitated and in deep sorrow. As tears streamed down his eyes, he said that his 35 year old daughter died of cancer that morning at the Cancer Institute, Chennai. He had received the news of her death and that her body had been taken to Tirunelvelli, the place she lived with her husband and their seven year old son. The old man wanted to go to Tirunelvelli and he came to our office asking for Rs. 280, the bus charge for one way ticket to Tirunelvelli. He carried a small baggage that had his clothes. He had not eaten since morning, since the time he received the news of his daughter’s death.

The man gave details of how he got our office address, claimed that he knew the Director of the organization where I work and that she had helped him on various occasions. He carried an identity card that indicated that he had worked in the industry run by my Director’s brother.

The man lived with his wife and three daughters in a small house in the city, he had to sell the house to raise money for the marriages of his daughters. Post- retirement and after his wife passed away, with no resources to provide for himself, he moved in to Vishranti, an old age home in Chennai.

None of these can be verified, it seemed inappropriate because the sorrow and the aloneness of the old man was distressing. He refused to drink a glass of water or a cup of tea. I caught a brief glimpse of him as he sat forlorn on the sofa waiting for any help that would come his way. We pooled together five hundred rupees, money that will take him to see his daughter. He thankfully accepted the money, declined again the offer of a cup of tea and a bottle of water to carry for his journey. When my colleague asked him to eat something on the way as the journey to Tirunelvelli would take many hours, he shook his head and shuffled out. As he opened the door and stepped out, he seemed so alone.

Long after the old man left my office thankful for the money we gave him, my mind conjured the life of the man that I knew nothing of, from the details that he gave us and the sense of loss and pain that he left behind. The man is 76 years old; nearly as old as my father was when he passed away. He walked out alone, his shoulders slumped. The image of the man retreating sits wedged in my mind, I will carry it for long along with the image I carry of my father walking into the Check-in lounge of the airport the year my mother passed away, to take a flight to Bombay. He had just locked away his flat, had no home to come back to, nothing in life to look forward to. He walked with trepidation, alone and at total loss, sans the companion with whom he had created a family and a life.

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Memories, Relationships, HistorySeptember 2, 2008 9:14 am

The Politics Of Remembering

The more I gather details about my family history, the seven siblings of my mother’s grandmother and the seven siblings of my mother’s grand father, I find myself drawn deeper in the mire of relationships, loose ends that need to be routed to some path somewhere that I have to painstakingly unearth not through the easy means of calling up an uncle here, an aunt there. The uncovered  branches, the partial details, the contradictory references by two different people to certain details, the facts that had not been put to verification over all the years emerge tantalizingly before me as I hastily write down in my diary the questions that want to scale the gaps and crease out contradictions. It is then that I realize that I have to carry the darkness within me, write about them and accept that at no point in the chronicling will I have clarity over everything because I am dealing with history, history created through memory and partial remembering – partial because there are not people to narrate all the facets of the story, and partial also because we choose to forget certain things.

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Memories, Relationships, HistoryAugust 22, 2008 3:06 pm

Pathways Of Blood

Whenever my mother started in this manner, “My mother’s father had seven siblings and my mother’s mother had seven siblings,” I fled from the place. Just a few days ago my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, said that when they were children every other day several first and second cousins of his mother with their families dropped in at their Pelathope residence in Mylapore. My grandmother had many half brothers whom she called as her brothers, cousins whom she called brothers; ironically she did not have a single straight brother or sister whom she shared her mother’s womb with. I thought being a single child makes life simple, but certainly not in the case of my grandmother as my mother and uncle had me understand!  

My uncle recalled how he and his siblings constantly asked my grandmother to help them understand how the uncles, aunts, cousins were related. At a simplistic level that the children naively initially mistook as the end all of cognition, she traced the straight forward and immediate way in which she was related to all the people who dropped in with their families; at a tormenting level she explained how the cousin’s/ uncle’s wife was related in other ways as well. No relationship ran a single way, there were crisscrosses – an aunt was related to an uncle even before marriage through a brother’s wife or a sister’s husband or an aunt’s sister-in-law. Or she teased her children’s  young and tender brains further by adding how the cousin’s wife was also her sister’s sister-in-law’s husband’s uncle’s daughter. 

To understand theses labyrinthine pathways of blood and relationships called for an alert mind that processed the data and assigned it to slots, the slots that were  permeable and punctured several times with conduits of alliances  to such an extent that these slots were defined not by its exclusiveness but by these jabs that rerouted blood pathways. 

I presume there was not a dull moment in the lives of my mother and her siblings with the constant influx of brothers (?!), aunts and uncles into their Mylapore home that served as a hub for all those people coming from Mayavaram, Edakudi, Kumbakonam, Karur  and several other places in Thanjavur jilla where an uncle was a mirajdar,  an aunt had been taken as a bride from or where a cousin had been married into.

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Memories, Relationships, HistoryAugust 6, 2008 5:00 am

The Deep Sea Of Memory

I can talk now, tell the story of my parents. I can write of the guilt I feel now of having been so absorbed in my own world that I never knew what my mother went through at the death of her parents, at the passing away of her younger brother and on losing another brother to schizophrenia. 

Looking back now, after nearly two decades, my mother then would have been as old as I am now. I pick my memory to reconstruct my mother’s life at that time.   I wade through the deep sea of childhood memories to cast light on the relationships in her life that mattered so much to her, at the losses that pained and paralysed her. 

Memories of my grandfather’s home concretize in my mind, the memories are that of a small and young girl. The memories of a twelve something girl is seen through the sensibility of the adult that I am now. This might be a step away from truth as my consciousness penetrates through a different time and this has made me in fact two different individuals – a child that saw and a woman that wants to immortalize her mother by fleshing her out in different relationships, in seeing her life crisscross several lives.

This exercise is also largely to exorcise the guilt I experience that I perceived my mother selfishly only in relation to me, in relation to my emotional wants and needs. The sun shone brightly on me, as a small and young girl,  through the  dappled leaves as I felt my mother’s care and love nourish me. But, the corner of my mind always registered her joys, her pains and her agonies. All this, I hope to establish by unearthing memories that I had not acknowledged before. 

So my exercise now is to hold the flashlight away from me, at all the people who were close to my mother, at my memory of the events that did not necessarily have to do with me, at the warm corners in my grandfather’s home where my mother grew and whose images I am certain she carried vividly till the day of her death.

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MemoriesDecember 23, 2007 5:24 pm

A Farewell To The Evolved Soul

On 21 - 12 - 2007  my husband’s aunt passed away, a plain tribute, in my opinion, will negate all that she represented; it will do an injustice to her spirit that defied structures of all types. Before I write the memoriam I want to make my position clear. I did not know the subject too well, did not have many opportunities to get very close to her. I lived for many years after my marriage outside Chennai and as soon as we returned to Chennai I had been smothered with responsibilities and had to grapple with the grief at the loss of my parents, I had drawn myself into a shell. This writing is not only an emotional response to the passing away of my husband’s aunt (will henceforth be referred as my aunt, and will also refer to my husband’s uncle as my uncle) but is as much an urge to engage in exploring the complexities of human relationships, the motives behind the choices we make and the ironies of life.

My aunt’s biography is difficult to put together as her life followed a trajectory that was unique in many ways. She hailed from Vellore and was married to my father-in-law’s youngest brother who was from Chittoor. Her name was changed as soon as she was married into the family as her husband’s sister had the same name as hers. I had always wondered what it would feel like for a young bride to be called by her husband by a name that is not what she came with. Did it sound for many days as if her husband was calling some other woman?

The couple lived the most part of their married years in Madras. They have a daughter, who is now 47 and is a mother herself of a twenty year old son. My uncle was a professor of English in a college. My aunt started out as a school teacher in the Chinmaya Vidyalaya and later became the headmistress of the same school. At a time when not many of her generation of women from her family went to work, she was a working woman and a successful one to boot. She rode to work on her moped, crisscrossed long distances the streets of Madras on her own not wanting a man to wait on her. She was fiercely independent and very progressive in her thoughts. She pushed the boundaries of her life, always searched for frontiers beyond the immediate. That was what she set out to do when she got involved passionately in the activities of the Chinmaya Mission along with her husband. It was a definitive path that they were laying for themselves, a path where they were to traverse together but contained as independent entities to themselves.

My aunt and uncle learnt Vedanta and Brahma sutras from renowned gurus like Swami Chinmayananda and Swami Dayananda Saraswathi. When I got married and got to know her, she had retired and was actively involved in teaching slokas and the Bhagavad Gita to a group of people, my uncle too had taken to teaching the Vedanta after retirement. It seemed a logical step that they entered Vanaprastha ashrama of sorts after their commitments and responsibilities as parents had been completed and after their retirement from their jobs.

The aunt built a community of students along the years. They stayed with her, became a family during the years that her daughter was busy with her own. My aunt kept herself busy, traveled long distances to teach to her dedicated students. During these years she developed several health problems, she was diagnosed to be diabetic, she had a heart attack, underwent bypass and prior to that angioplasty and the likes. To sum up her health was on a downward slide.

The knowledge of the mortality of her flesh was the test she was forged through, a thorough Vedantin that she was, she watched with amusement the natural course of decay that her body was preparing for. This was the phase when I got to meet her quite a few times and I observed that nothing took the smile from her face; even on occasions that she was breathless she gave her elusive smile. With me she never had anything much to talk, since the time I got married into this family I realized that smiles cemented our relationship.

At about the same time her husband announced that he was going to become a sanyasi. Steeped in Samsara I cannot imagine what it means for a spouse to accept the decision of her partner wanting to become a sanyasi, to renounce life — i.e., marriage, relationships, responsibilities and commitments. Many people in the family found it difficult to accept and understand. Myriad questions crowded our minds – what about his responsibility to his wife whose health was a matter of great concern (her heart condition was having a debilitating effect on her health)? Can’t a person continue to be in samsara and still live a life of deep reflection and understanding?

My aunt seemed to understand and accept his decision; she acted with commendable grace when her husband’s brothers and relative who meant well for her expressed their disapproval of her husband’s decision. Her daughter too seemed to understand the deep understanding that her parents shared that caused such a decision from one and a total acceptance from the other. In fact my aunt sometimes, by her demeanor and detachment appeared more like a sanyasi.

As outsiders we are not privy into the layered relationship between the couple, they remained couple in my opinion even after my uncle took sanyasam. We were looking at them in their new roles, but they were not very different to each other – each seemed to know the yearnings of the spirit that took them on their respective paths. So similar had their pursuits been that any of them would have made a good candidate for Sanyasam, in fact both of them had shifted gears and moved in their own way into the last stage of Varnashrama dharma – one wore the kashayam while the other did not, and that was the only difference.

The greatest blow for all of us was when their only daughter lost her husband suddenly, and she was only 45 and she had a son in his teens.  My aunt became an anchor in their lives, this was only natural. What struck me was she became an indulgent parent wanting to recreate the cocoon of blithe, fun of early motherhood unsullied by pains and suffering; the mother and daughter were able to defy time and regress to idyllic moments when they teamed and started traveling and visiting places and meeting people, putting their past behind them.

And then the end came — the brain hemorrhage that suspended my aunt between life and death for almost a week. My uncle saw the end much before us, he wanted us to let her go. The doctors wanted to give her more time before removing her from the life support systems, and the family opined that being an evolved soul, she would know when to leave. I wonder what worked in the subconscious that would have remained alert with the vasanas of the days just before the blackout. There are many ways I have seen people passing away — my mother was surprised into a sudden death, my father chose his way out; I am confused if death is a larger design and am not clear if human will does prevail.

Did my aunt want to hang on longer for the sake of her daughter and her grandson whom she was fond of? I have read about near death experiences of a few people who felt their soul disengage from the body and watch their dear ones helplessly. As her daughter  visited her at the insular ICU, did she look on, helpless at the strength of matter that  prevailed on her spirit? Like always, did she put up a fight? And what was it for an evolved being like her wanting to hang on instead of slipping away which she would definitely have done on changed circumstances, that is, if it was not necessary to be there for her daughter? Did she not know that someday she would have to let go, and did she procrastinate that day because of her love for her daughter?

The doctors finally gave up hopes as they saw the condition not improve. Her husband (Swamiji) requested the doctors to remove her off the support system the next day, on the  Vaikunta Ekaadasi day and let her go away. He left for Pondicherry for a discourse. On Vaikunta Ekaadasi, she was removed off the Ventilator and she was able to breathe on her own for about 24 hours. The next morning she wrapped herself up and slipped away.

As she lay dead, she seemed so alone, despite having her students and her daughter besides her. The Brahmin lead the grandson through the funerary rituals. I heard, among several mantras ‘Kalyani Namnaha, Athreya Gotra’. I was struck by the irony of these words. She had relinquished her name when she was married into this family and she had left behind her parents’ gotram and had taken her husband’s Athreya gotram soon after marriage. Her marriage was for all purpose defunct and her identity after her death was constructed on what was not hers.  Knowing her sense of humour, she would have joked at this quirk of irony had she been alive to hear this!   

                                           

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