HOMAGE TO MY MOTHER ON HER BIRTH CENTENARY

HOMAGE TO MY MOTHER ON HER BIRTH CENTENARY

No one in the family knew her date of birth, even my elder brother who was born when she was only fifteen years old. Looking for birth certificates was out of the question, for I don’t think they were issued during those times. School leaving certificate did not exist and if they did, were not insisted upon, for most women did not study beyond the fifth standard and by that time, they were of marriageable age. My mother was married when she was only thirteen and left for her in-law's place soon thereafter.

The only thing certain was the month and the star she was born under. Birthdays were not celebrated not as per the date of birth, but as per the stardate which varies from year to year and the celebration was by way of puja at the nearby temple. As the date for delivery of my elder daughter was drawing close, she would say that she expected her to be born on her star birthday. She was nearly correct except for the fact that my daughter was born one day earlier. That was how I deduced that her star centenary falls on the 29^th of October this year.

I do not know how we would have celebrated it had she been alive. Maybe a grand function where all relatives and friends would be invited and a special day celebrated and at the end of the day, get back to our routine. She’s been gone for the last eighteen years and the only time we remember her is during the Shradh performed on her death anniversary, which again is as per the Thithi and not the date, every year.

My mother was the eighth child of a large family of ten children. She had three elder sisters, four elder brothers, and two younger brothers. She was born in the Tamil month of Aippasi under the star Visakha in the year 1919. Her father Subramanian, also known as Subba Iyer was an Executive Engineer which in those days was a position of eminence. I derive my name from him and that’s why the surfeit of Subramanians (with quite a few on my father’s side also) in the entire family. Her mother Subbulakshmi was a strong and authoritarian lady, which trait was an absolute necessity to run such a large family. My mother was named Lakshmi (there was also a surfeit of Lakshmis). Along with the intelligence she inherited from her family, she also imbibed traits of humor in her character and which endeared her to everyone she met. But in later years there was a tinge of sarcasm that crept into her interactions. May be the effects of aging and the need for more attention

She was small of build, fair and good looking. Though her schooling stopped when she was in her fifth standard, in her later years it was her native intelligence that carried her through the rest of her life. She was a voracious reader and that was her window to the world. Married at thirteen, became a mother at fifteen, she accompanied my father with a year-old child to far off Delhi at the age of sixteen and widowed at forty-four. I can only imagine the extent of her courage and grit, moving away from a large family to start her life in an unknown place and unfamiliar people. But whenever she talked about her earlier years, she would always remember the good times and good friends. After a couple of years, my father moved to a new job in Bombay and she was equally at ease there with the added advantage of being with close relations- her elder brother and elder sister and their families. She used to recall how they all stayed together in the same apartment in Matunga and how supportive they were of each other. After five years in Bombay my father who had completed his Cost Accountant course joined the Hindustan Shipyard in Visakhapatnam and that’s where she spent the maximum period of her life till my father passed away in 1963.

I have written about both my parents in my book ‘I am just An Ordinary Man’. I have covered a significant portion in my blog post dated 12^th May 2019, ‘Mother’s Day- A Tribute to all Parents. So, I have tried to avoid repetition, but I could not avoid but repeat a paragraph in that post and which is there in my book, for that, in a nutshell, brings out the person she was –

‘It is always our tendency to eulogize about people who are not with us anymore. I do not intend to do that for it would instill a sense of hypocrisy in my sincere efforts to paint her as the person she really was. It is only when we accept a person with all their weaknesses apart from extolling all the good things they possess, that we really love them. My mother also had her faults and this sometimes blinded her vis-à-vis relationships. I was predominant in her affections which sometimes clouded her reasoning where others were concerned. She was very forward looking and accepted many things which her generation could not, but still there was that part of her which refused to yield to perceived threats to her authority and possessiveness where I was concerned. This is only to highlight that she was very much human. But what stood out was her strength of character and her compassion.’

There will be no celebrations on her centenary. There will only be a silence filled with her thoughts and a prayer. For me paying homage to her through this post of mine I felt would be more lasting.

NOSTALGIA 

Five years ago, I wrote a post ‘Memories were made of these’ on my blog. I talked of all the things we hold on to, all those acquisitions over the years and which over course of time become irrelevant to our present needs. But even among these irrelevant things, there are some which we can never seem to part with.

Despite the fact that I have succeeded in dumping all my music and video cassettes, and technical books and books I know I’ll never read or have never read despite buying them (in retrospect I am unable to recall why I bought them in the first place).  I have now dumped my old mobile. But I did not throw it away. It has gone into that pile of other things I have been accumulating over the years – older mobiles, old cameras, watches, spectacles, and pens. Well, they stay for now. The day for dumping them may not be far off’. And what have I achieved in the process? More space in the house, less dusting. But these irrelevant acquisitions seem to come in cycles and dumping becomes a continuous process so there really is no end. But when we dump, we do throw away some memories, of happenings, places, and people.

There were two interesting comments on that blogpost, portions of which I am reproducing below –

‘You have really touched a raw nerve in many like me who have been 'collectors" all our lives, finding it difficult to part with them, supported by sentimental reasons and other rationalizations. We know that we are not going to carry them with us.’

‘We are all great collectors of these antiquated materials which we hope to sort out someday. Sadly, that someday never arrives. I wonder if there is any remedy to declutter the house of all these unwanted things.’

I titled that post as ‘Memories were made of these’ and not ‘are’ made of these? These things have been dumped and so have your memories along with them. And then one day it shall happen – You get dumped’.

Today I found tucked in one corner of my cupboard an album of old photographs. And as I glanced from photo to photo, I relived my life from a five-year-old, a schoolboy, as a youth in college, a married man and then as a father. There were other photos of my daughters, the process of their growing up, their marriage, the grandson and lastly me and my wife – me bald and she grey-haired. These photographs carry memories of the path I have traversed and now as I sit flipping through them, I realize that it is the only thing I can do. I cannot dispute the fact that it gave me great joy and healed some of the loneliness that seemed to be creeping in. But along with it was the realization that those moments can never come back. The path is only one way, forward.

I am quoting a passage from my book which is in the process of being completed-

“I remember from one of Camus’s books where he says ‘There is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory.... everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it". The ability to forget is what’s wonderful about life, for it starts the process of healing, though it’s sad that the path you had traversed, slowly fades from your memory. Life is a process and it flows like the river, in one direction only, but it does carry remnants of all that have been dumped into it. What remnants it carries forward, are ultimately dumped on its journey to the ocean.

It was in 2014 that I wrote 'I am just An Ordinary Man' my first book. Five years have passed and when I opened the book to reread which I do sometimes I came across a passage which is as relevant today as it was then-

'As I sat in front of the computer trying to recollect and go backward in time, I found that I was enacting the role of Krapp (from the play Krapp's Last Tape. It’s a late evening in the future and its Krapp‟s sixty-ninth birthday as he reviews the recordings, he had made on his tape recorder, thirty years ago, when he was only thirty-nine. The stage is set with Krapp sitting inside his room lit only by a light above his head with the shadows behind him. The theme moves back and forth, a review of the past and the present. For me what was an intellectual discussion four decades ago was a reality now. I had my computer where I had recorded all that I felt and all that I have been feeling right now, whereas Krapp did that on his tape recorder and stored them on spools. The world has moved on but not the reality of existence.'

In the play Krapp allows the tape to play on until the final curtain. Krapp’s spool of life is almost wound, and the silent tape is both the time it has left to run and the silence into which he must pass.

As one grows older, he seeks more and more solace from memories of a life that had been. This is inevitable as loneliness creeps in. The more he gets immersed in it, the more difficult he finds getting out. Nostalgia in the days gone by was considered a neurological disease. But views have changed. 

There was an article in the New York Times dated 8^th July 2013by John Tierney where it says that Nostalgia is not such a bad thing at all it says –

“Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom, and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.

Nostalgia does have its painful side — it’s a bittersweet emotion — but the net effect is to make life seem more meaningful and death less frightening. When people speak wistfully of the past, they typically become more optimistic and inspired about the future”.

Long ago I wrote –

Something stirred,

Swept away

Three decades of dust.

Bygones had come back,

To stay.

That same stare,

Reminded me of

The roses in the garden.

Leave me, let me be,

Content in my phantasy.

No doubt life is a process but we do seek moments of happiness by reflecting on the past, but these are transient. Clinging-on makes it all the more difficult to move forward

Look around you the reality is here and not back there.