‘With a Grateful Heart’

Day 1

(My mother, Bhavani, during her Convocation)

I am grateful for my mother.

I am grateful to my mother.

She was one of the first working women in our entire community. She was also the very first woman to have an education, at a time when not many children went in for any kind of education beyond the tenth grade.

She was a pioneer and she had to face a lot of flak.

A. Lot. Of. Flak

In India, after a girl/woman gets married, she leaves her home and goes to live in her husband’s. My mother did not have a subservient bone in her body. She refused to let her in-laws or her husband ride roughshod over her.

This redoubtable woman, who could translate Shakespeare into Malayalam, my mother tongue, and into Sanskrit, my mother’s tongue, was different in every which way from the members of the family she had married into. And it did not help that she was dark-skinned, a fact that they reminded her of, every day because that was the only place her hide was softer. My father and every member of his family were fair and light-eyed: my father is called Sukumar. One of the interpretations of the name is ‘good-looking’, or ‘handsome.’ Which he was, then. Which he is, now.

My mother cut through all the crap, like a warm knife through hard butter. She insisted that she would finish her postgraduation in Sanskrit Literature, her Bachelor’s in Education, and get a job. Did she? She did.

She insisted that she would get a job, as a teacher, in the best school at the time, the Kendriya Vidyalaya, or the Central School. Did she? She did.

She insisted that her children would only study in the best schools, in spite of very stiff opposition from everyone in her adopted home. Did she manage that? She did.

Picture this, if you will.

A young woman, far from home and everything that she knew and held dear, since birth, alone and adrift on a sea of resentment and vilification, in a tiny little boat that she has to provide with sails and oar…and direction. She not only learned to sail that boat but to bring it safely to the shore, with all of us clinging to her while fighting for our own identities, like so many marsupials.

She gave no quarter. Took no prisoners. People sing the praises of queens and princesses, kings and princes.

She was our queen, princess, the Warrior of the family. Made sure that we were all high and dry, leading our own lives, secure in the spaces we had chosen before she left us. On a day in May, when all the world was celebrating the arrival of spring, our winter began.

I am grateful for my mother.

I am grateful to my mother.

©️ Suma Narayan

This is a response to one of the light-filled prompts of Ravyne Hawke’s publication, ‘Promptly Written’ , for the month of November. I have made a resolution to write one story every day, about gratitude, for every day of the month. God knows I have enough reasons to be grateful, and even if I were to write a story a day for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t run out of stories. But since I am famously lazy, and revel in that state, I hope I can stick to the resolution. I would be much obliged if I am cheered on from time to time, by all you generous people, so that I can stick to the resolution.

Thank you.

Have a blessed day.