Mother's Day Afterthoughts...

One sweltering May, many  years ago, I stitched up a patchwork of colourful cloth scraps and stuffed it with silk cotton from  an old pillow to make mom  my first ever Mother’s Day present, a  pincushion to keep her needles .The next year it was a pink organdie rose, I learnt to make in craft class.

Mom in her pastel cotton saris (sometimes tinged with a hint of yellow from a stubborn turmeric stain), ever exuding a faint scent of her favourite Cuticura talc, was always prompt to gush with joy at these little surprises.

Looking back, I realise that I never knew what mom truly fancied, nor can I slip anymore into the psyche of the ten year old who thought that a pincushion would make an exciting Mother’s Day gift.  From where I stood as a child, mom’s face was an expanse of serene acceptance, no specific needs or demands, no unique likes or fetishes.

It was as if motherhood had neutralised her humours and smoothened the sharp edges of her youth to mould her into mom, pleasantly plump and warm in her floral voiles.

Cut to May 2013.                     

The scene: my bedroom

It is last minute frenzied packing time as I try to stuff an assortment of clothing into a very disobedient bag. The train to our annual holiday destination leaves early the next morning and it is literally mounds to go before I sleep.

Enter my fifteen year old: “Are you wearing that tomorrow? “She points to the green shirt I have laid aside.

”Why not?” I ask prepared for another unreasonable adolescent- mom tiff.

“Because I am wearing something similar and it is so u n c o o l to dress like your mom”, she replies aghast.

 “No worries Babe”, I quip back, “I’ll pretend we’re not related”

She stomps out of the room to sulk in solitude.

Fighting over clothes isn’t something I did with my mother as a teen. She cooked, cleaned and entertained in her graceful Lucknow Chikankari saris and starched cottons. Today, I hop, skip and jog through my chores in Capris and tracks, sometimes sharing and other times sneaking from my teen’s wardrobe.  But then, neither did mom ever eat a full bar of chocolate all by herself every weekend, fight for the remote or clamour for the window seat.

In all this and more, my children have had in me another sibling to negotiate with.

What then, about this ache to be lauded and remembered as a mother-the universal epitome of selflessness. This I presume is one of the latter day honours reserved for mothers like mine, from an age when a placid wide lake flowed between generations, separating our lives into different eras. Mom exalted in her aura of dignified charm taught me to sift the right from the taboo. Today, I blend with the lives and experiences of my children, infusing it with a measure of care, a pinch of good advice and a wise ounce of admonition. Not too different from when I disguised the ‘yucky vegetables’ and the bitter pills of their toddlerhood.

So it is fine if I hear more of “Mom you freak me out” from my teenagers rather than the “Mom I love you “of their pre adolescent innocence.  It is okay to be reminded that I belong to the Bryan Adams generation if I am caught humming my favourite Jayeslee cover of “pay phone”.

Because, I would rather be a ‘current version mom’ fully loaded with all the relevant apps rather than a faint echo from across the turbulent waters that separates this challenging generation from mine.

P.S:- On the two hour ride to our resort from the station, my son leans on my shoulder dizzy and car sick, my daughter  rests her head on my lap. The shirts we are wearing are kind of similar but mom is clearly the one in charge.

As I celebrate my mother as a daughter and my daughter as a mother, I experience the currents of courage and support that flow instinctively between women of two different generations. Why then does a mother resort to killing her greatest source of strength, her unborn daughter?

This is a conscience call to all women, many educated yet ignorant, who commit the blunder of weeding their female off springs, in a cowardly act of surrender to warped dictates.

 After all to be a mother is not for the weak and nor is Mother’s day for the faint hearted.

Echoes from the Womb

____________________________

What are little girl's lives made of?

Not sugar, nor spice

Nothing quite so nice.

In the snug darkness of your womb,

When you stealthily sensed my presence,

You tore me out in haste,

Long before my term

And snuffed out my little life

As if I was a worm.

Elsewhere... in some nameless village,

On a hot and dusty morn,

I announce with a lusty cry,

'Mother I am Born'

But you sing a dirge to me,

With tears my body you soak,

You feed me husk with milk

And dig my grave as I choke.

Did you never yearn my mother?

To feel my soft curls in your arms

Or press gently against my cheeks

As you fall to their dimpled charms?

Or kiss my little hands,

That hug you so tight in sleep

Or bless my grateful heart

That loves you ever so deep!

Mother, I am your flesh and blood, not regret,

No mirage you choose to forget,

Grant me a life; I am your daughter,

Not a blunder in your quest for my brother!                                                                

-Asha Susan Mathew

Beckoning the Brown Bird

The mighty neem was the first to crash, like a gentle giant, apologetic about its broken arms that betrayed the trust of many nestlings. The rain tree was the next to succumb to the joint venture between builder and apartment owner towards project ‘new for old.’

  

The unassuming old buildings and the trees that grew around them, planted by wind or bird, unmindful of pattern or symmetry, were a slice of the unhurried eighties that I could still cherish, from the side of the compound wall that I shared with this middle class housing board colony. Today, having razed all to the ground, a yellow demolition army of machines rests, on the still expanse of land, like prehistoric monsters spent of rage.

 No stray neem leaf shall float to my backyard; no strange bird call shall interrupt my reverie...Soon this too shall pass into the memory file named nostalgia to be turned gold alongside the simple joys of an 'unwired' life like perhaps waking to a crisp morning of incessant sparrow chatter.

March 20^th is World Sparrow Day announced a recent newspaper write up. And would it return to the environment it had renounced? Perhaps, if lured by free grain schemes and detergent box homes, the article suggested!

Looking back, I wonder when the little brown bird flew out of our everyday lives, that we now need to bring him back from his refuge where he is probably still sulking over our indifference to his meagre needs. After all, for anyone who grew up in the sleepy eighties, the simple sparrow was no celebrity, just an unobtrusive bird that chirped in the background of our lives, right from our predictable Binaca toothpaste mornings to the insipid Doordarshan evenings.

During those endless summer vacation days, as we whiled away hours playing checkers with friends in the veranda, sparrow couples would perch on the clothes line seriously twittering away opinions and concerns about the nesting prospects in our old lived in house and then unanimously agree to call it home. Many weeks later faint chirps would emerge from father’s old helmet hanging on the wall or from a window ledge or loft. They were now a family!

 Sometimes a skinny little fledgling would fall off his precarious nest only to be promptly deposited into his home by our maid. ’Kuruvi koota kalacha paavam’(it is sin to destroy a sparrow’s nest ) she would say in all her rustic wisdom, warning any of us who wanted to play with the adventurous youngster or take a sneak peek into the nest for a closer look.

As kids, the sparrow never featured in our list when we reeled out names of birds while playing ‘categories’. We showed off with an albatross or a toucan. Neither did it feature in our school essays. They were all about proud peacocks and splendid swans but ironically it is the plain little sparrow that taught more than all those magnificent picture book birds.

I learnt my first lesson in’ feminism’  in nature when mother pointed out to the strikingly attractive male bird as he desperately wooed the rather nonchalant  plain Jane grey headed female. And I thought that the pretty one was the female!

Their amazing devotion as they built a home one patient straw after another and then lovingly nurturing their perpetually hungry chicks, belied their little forms. Yet, above all was their unquestioning acceptance of the most painfully profound rules of nature, in letting their young ones fly away into freedom with no bondage of gratitude. A cycle of life so filled with earnest simplicity compared to the trivial complexities of our human existence.   

So, will the sparrow return to our window sills once more to nudge us gently out of our sleep with his love song before we are startled awake by shrill cell phone alarms?

Will they inhabit our antiseptic match box flats where children ‘water’ virtual plants on Farmville, converse with Talking Toms and play only with Angry Birds?

Will they consent to be part of a habitat where panic alarms are raised on spotting a cockroach and where good home makers must be armed with colour coded insect sprays and have pest control on speed dial?

We will have to play pied pipers of a different sort to coax the sparrow to forgive and return.

As I write this, I hear busy noises outside, below my window air conditioner. Someone is building a nest out of pilfered fragments of a broom and lining it with strips of my mop cloth.

No, it is not the elusive sparrow; just a pair of squirrels making a home. I am a homemaker too, so I will play fair and let them stay.

 One sunny May, a couple of years ago,I had a visitor at my ledge.This is for you  lone sparrow, whom I secretly hoped would stay. 

Sparrow Verse

At my

Window, sepia

Flutter of wings bring fond

Tidings from sunny yesterday on

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Where the Mind is "Nirbhaya" - Thinking Aloud

‘The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference’

                                                                                                                  -Bess Myerson

They chose to name her ‘Nirbhaya’, the fearless one, as if was a virtual armour to fortify her spirit to survive. Now, a little more than a week after her death it is a title to honour her battle.

If only words had the power to wish away mortal wounds!

Today an angry nation seethes in a chaos of protests against a system impotent to assure a woman safety, no, not in the tribal terrains of unexplored India, but in the capital city of the world’s largest democracy.

Yet ponder beneath layer after filthy layer of such heinous crimes against women and what you discover is a perverse society which still mourns the birth of a daughter and often brings up a son on a diet of exaggerated self importance He is the chosen one, his father’s trump card to heaven, who will rule the brood because he is innately superior to all the women in his life. An attitude he takes beyond the circle of his family to subjugate womanhood in totality to a vassal hood of sorts.

 Today we have ‘god men’  that argue how  the victim literally brought this horror upon herself all because she did not have the presence of mind or inclination to entreat  the drunken brutes into a pact of sacred religious brotherhood. A statement, that goes beyond being just a ridiculously simplistic solution to a pathetically shallow reaction to a rape victim’s plight.

Ironically, it is not just men that contribute to such thought but a large number of women with warped thinking as well.

Recently, walking through the glittering aisle of a gift shop, admiring the delicate Swarovski swans and glass blooms, I came across a sign that read

Nice to see,                                                                           
Nice to hold,
But if it is broken,
Consider it sold.

Strangely enough, it took me back to many of those ‘rationally challenged ‘movies I had watched as a child on television.

A hapless woman’s modesty is outraged by the villain. Her father promptly hangs himself from the ceiling. A Panchayat is called where the accused arrives unabashed .He is condemned to marry the wronged woman so that she can salvage her honour. Justice prevails and all is well in a world where a woman is a crystal vase sold to the one who tainted her. Equally repulsive was a film that shockingly enough went on to win several awards- the supreme saga of a woman who marries her rapist to reform him to righteousness. Ah the sweet fruits of sin!

Talking of movies, one wishes there were more on the lines of Mirch Masala , a 1985 production  starring Smitha Patil as the firebrand village woman who with rare courage  terminates the threatening advances of a lustful  Subedar  by hurling sacks of chilli powder on him  with the help of other tormented  women.

Again, such portrayals were rare and more often than not relegated to the genre of parallel cinema. Going by the stereotypes, I wonder if it was the common truth of the times that was reflected on the silver screen or such portrayal that slowly conditioned the society. The debate continues...

Today, to rise above this mire of decadence is the call of the enlightened and the empathetic body of men and women. I see it as the courage to step out of the cosy cocoons that we build around ourselves into a not too comfortable zone of more responsibilities. It could be something as basic as discussing such sensitive topics within the family without the unaffordable embarrassment, so that we may empower our women with skills and attitudes that ensure their safety. And do it with the same methodical seriousness as aware parents would follow their child’s vaccine schedule or educational progress.

It is also a call to move from mute acceptance to vociferous questioning, as and when we encounter these demons around us. Whether it is to defend a neighbour who is a victim of marital violence (www.bellbajao.org) or to courageously shield a school girl from prying hands on a public bus (www.tulir.org).It could even be something as personal as refusing to assess the gender of the baby in your womb or rejecting the suitor who measures his worth in your father’s wealth.

 To do all this and more ‘Nirbhaya’, fearless of ridicule, immune to the apparent impracticality, because as men and women  sharing a common set of beliefs, we owe it to all our women, not just the unfortunate one who was raped of all her hopes and dreams that night on a bus in Delhi.

And also because, all that prowled fearlessly that tragic night were ugly monsters of carnal lust that have thrived through times on the indifference of a lopsided society and the paucity of potent laws.

  This is for you, Daughter of our hearts that rekindled the flame within a nation to unite for causes...let us not need such painful reminders to set things right.

Daughter of Our Hearts

Squandered spoils of a plunder,

Pawn in a game of vice,

Defiled in soulless slaughter,

I am Draupadi’s daughter

Lost to demoniac lust,

Rescued ragdoll nameless

Reclaimed by earth, fire and water,

I am Sita’s daughter

Call me not deity,

Nor brave heart divine,

Even my little dreams

Are no longer mine.

 I am the tragic truth

That did a nation’s pride shatter

Mourn for me, India,

I am your dear departed daughter.

Asha Mathew