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A Son Remembers
A Son Remembers
“You dog, all your shorts are torn” went her singsong to me as I would
prance around her. Poor lady, always mending; be it clothes or
relationships. And I was one hyper kid, dreaming of being the next
Bruce Lee; I loved kicking and the stitching at the bottoms of my
shorts would always come off. It took a gunshot in my foot to mellow
me down otherwise I just wasn’t ready to grow up. As a college student,
returning back from CP (a popular market in Delhi) after getting a new
pair of jeans stitched, I launched into a fancy sidekick while waiting for
the bus home and the entire bottom stitching from the zipper to the
belt came off. It was an amusing upwind bus ride back home.
However there was nothing fancy about my mother. She was just an
ordinary woman, no great stunner, nothing very intellectual and no
major credentials to boast of. She was just a hardworking, dedicated
tireless soul with a heart of gold. She had always been a no frills lady
who spoke her heart and walked the talk.
The eldest of six sisters and two alcoholic riffraff younger brothers, my
mother lived like Atlas untiringly shouldering her wobbly world which
was always in a tizzy, yet she was rarely dizzy. Her father renamed
Kranti (revolution) Kumar by none other than the legendary Bhagat
Singh was a revolutionary freedom fighter himself.
A much wanted terrorist during the British Raj, Kranti Kumar had little
time for family spending 18 years in various jails and a lifetime of
being on the run. My mother, Urmila was born on 08 January 1939 and
was barely seven years old when her father was languishing in Lahore
jail and India tottered to independence. He had to be smuggled out
back to India months later in a goods train by his Muslim comrades in
the midst of the chaotic mayhem of the partition of 1947.
Post independence, Kranti Kumar and his family lived as refugees for
over a decade at Purana Quilla( Old Fort) at Delhi. He was barely
considered a hero as he had belonged to the Revolutionary Party which
disintegrated with the hanging of Bhagat Singh. It was the Congress
that came to the helm of political affairs with Nehru in the driving seat
and Kranti Kumar had the distinction of gifting a black rose to Nehru
at a public meeting. Gandhiji had rightly wanted Congress disbanded
and he was a Mahatma in every sense. The Congress then had scant
regard for other freedom fighters that were just shaking off the
terrorist tag. The torture Kranti Kumar had undergone as a prisoner
had shattered his health. It was a turnaround history when I took my
ailing mother to visit the secret Mughal era dungeons in Red fort while
being posted there and she wept saying her father had been here as
well. Post Independence Kranti Kumar struggled to make ends meet by
turning into a freelance journalist. It is remarkable that he could write
in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu with fluency.
His killing turned into a major political event and ministers including
Indira Gandhi herself and Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited the bereaved
family. They were soon forgotten when either political party had
extracted their mileage from the event. I was barely one year old then
but I grew up hearing the events and my distaste for political parties
especially those that align themselves on religion stems largely from
this singular event. To write with justice on my maternal grandfather
would take reasonable research and this is one thing I shall undertake
in the near future. But any attempt to describe my mother would be
futile without describing her roots.
I was nicknamed Jooti chor (shoe thief) since I would steal any fancy
slippers/shoes of visitors and go hide with them under the bed. I used
to have a sizeable collection under my grand ma’s bed, I am told. I
wonder where this shoe fetish died; among so many of my childhood
dreams; maybe it was a sound thrashing. And then there used to be a
big pond close to our backyard where buffalos and kids would splash
and wrestle endlessly. I would always run free of my maternal uncles
and let go the moment we would hit the pond. Without knowing any
form of swimming, I would just plunge in and wait for my uncles to
rescue me and I refused to give up despite almost drowning a couple of
times.
I learned a valuable tip in that pond, one could float in water holding
onto a buffalo’s tail but never try this with a cow, no matter how holy
cows may be; floating cows will make you sink! I also remember how I
excited I was on seeing a blond buffalo for the first time ever, there
were none in Delhi.
It has been ages since I visited that place. The township, Athh(8) marla
in Punjabi was belatedly renamed Kranti Nagar after my Grandfather
but there are no traces of him or my mother or my grandmother
anymore. A part of me wants to go and re-connect, yet another one
shirks at the likely disappointment of finding nothing as the same. I
wish to live on dreaming that such place would always be there, a
sanctuary in the lap of my grandmother away from the madness. She is
long gone and so is my mother and the property and the surroundings
as well but they live on in my cherished dreams which would get
nullified if I face up and visit that place again.
When I was born, my parents lived in a single rented room along with
my paternal grandmother and two younger siblings of my father and a
constant stream of relatives from Punjab because Delhi was the place
to seek a new fortune. My mother was mother not only to her own
younger brothers and sisters but also to the younger siblings of her
husband and continued to perform her motherly role with full gusto
long after they had kids of their own. She could and sometimes
reprimanded any of them and they would always be deferential to her.
After all she was instrumental in getting most of them married and well
settled. She was a disciplinarian of sorts and did not believe in
mollycoddling any one. She was also extremely frugal without being a
miser. The most charitable of hosts as long as she was physically able
yet she considered any form of wastage as a sin.
It is amazing that she could happily run the ever filling home with the
meager salary of my dad. I have no memories of that one room house in
which people depended on a public toilet and bathroom but I hear from
my relatives and also my father that she somehow managed to run a
family and play hostess to hordes of satiated visitors. It is always
unfair to compare but I couldn’t help feeling rotten when my wife
would equate my relatives’ short visits as intrusion of privacy.
After a few years, I must have been around four when my father
purchased a small flat. It took selling off of the agricultural land in
Punjab and a hefty loan to buy a tiny flat in Delhi. It was one
boisterously happy family in a small nest; my grandparents, parents,
uncle and aunt and us kids. This is the time I remember vividly and all
those vacations to my maternal grandma happened around this time.
My uncle (dad’s younger brother) got married to my mom’s younger
sister. To this day, I continue calling her maasi (maa-si--- like mother,
which translates as maternal aunt) while my uncle remains Chacha
(paternal uncle).My younger brother was born and my mom had her
hands full. Soon after my cousins were born in quick succession and
my aunt got busy too.
My grandpa had this family barber, Ram Das who was one villain of a
man. Clad in dhoti and clutching a tin box of rusty implements he was
my grandpa’s favorite weapon against the kids. Leaving my sister, all
the kids would be lined up and made to endure a katori (bowl shaped)
haircut. I hated that barber, the sadistic pleasure he got from shaving
off my flowing locks. I had my revenge once, when I managed to
unleash Rosy, our German shepherd and set her after him. I was
soundly thrashed for this act by my mother but it ensured that the
poor guy never felt at home ever again at our place.
There are few things I imbibed from her which she never mentioned, as
the saying goes, children barely listen but they watch intently. My
mom was often spit fire and had a short fuse but would readily
apologise even to a child or a servant if she realised she had erred. She
was always happy to share whatever she had with the needy. I
remember she would carry huge parcels of gifts and food to orphanages
on my younger brother’s birthdays. Something I could not pick up was
her tidiness. She would always clean the kitchen and the rooms to her
personal satisfaction well after the maid had cleaned them.
The housemaster; Faryaz Khan Baghi, bless him, I remember his name
and his gait and that he was also a struggling poet. A strict man who
had phantoms of his own to chase, he just couldn’t handle the boys.
Seniors and juniors were sandwiched in a single hostel. I was a little
kid who suddenly woke up that it does not feel good being touched
surreptitiously by any one. I missed my mother and found some
substitute big brothers who were not sexually depraved. Then, one day
Baghi lost his cool on some senior boy over some indiscipline and
thrashed him, soon after a hurried meeting of boys was held and a
rebellion launched. When he came for the night round Baghi was
welcomed with waves of shoes flung at him from the boys hiding
behind quilts. He had to beat a hasty retreat and was locked up in his
room. The next morning, the boys hit the school complex ransacking
everything that came their way. The police had to intervene and
parents were summoned. Since mine were abroad, I was put on a bus
home. Folks back at home were shocked to see my hippie state. I had
scabies and lice in my unkempt long flowing hair. Without any
ceremony, my head was tonsured and I was put under discipline and
medication.
The distance with my mother had grown and I had turned into an
impulsive young man who was brash on surface but craved for love
internally. Life suddenly started downhill for my family, my sister’s
husband eloped with another woman and went missing for couple of
years. My sister fell back to family for a couple of years along with her
two little kids. My mother was shattered and her prime focus was my
sister and my younger brother who had grown into a young man but
had the mind of a five year old.
I was away physically and emotionally and woke up a wee bit too late
for my mother. I was trying to keep my marriage alive while my mother
was slowly decaying. She was ill for a considerable period and the
cancer went undetected till it was fully blown. I seethe with anger even
now that a damned medical specialist of a doctor failed to detect the
growing cancer in her uterus even with an ultrasound. It was a
homeopathic doctor who sensed things were drastically wrong and
rushed her for a thorough check up.
The drifting son finally returned kind of late. I clawed back to get
posted to Delhi and look after her. Ah! Regrets, so many of them, I
ensured she went through surgeries and bouts of chemotherapies but I
failed to be at her side as often as I should have been. She wasn’t made
to feel at home at my own home, I wonder when it that I had a home of
my own. In many ways I failed her as a son.
The chemo and the cancer turned her into a poor shadow of what she
was once. She had lost her lush hair and it really hurt me that drugs
which would shed her hair would be causing irreparable damage to her
entire body apart from subduing the cancerous cells. For a brief period
she suffered from severe anxiety and had to be placed under mood
uplifting drugs. She bounced back with the meds and seemed to take
the cancer in her stride. Just before her last few days, she seemed
cheerful till the cancer reared out of nowhere. She was put through
chemo again and this one had hit her hard. It seems she was
discharged before her RBC count had fully recovered. I got her back to
my dad’s home and got on with my work. She became bedridden and
started deteriorating rapidly. By the time I got home to her, she could
barely speak that she was happy to see me eventually.
I rushed her to the hospital, threw all my weight and money around,
after a few hours the docs claimed they had succeeded in reviving her
and that she will sail through. There was no waiting area at the ICU,
everyone left to return next day morning.
It was the night of 8th November 98, there was something eating me
inside, there was a feeling that things were beyond my control and I
should stop being casual and stick around. I refused to return home.
My younger cousin brother stayed back and slept in the car. Around
1Am while pacing the corridor outside the ICU I was called and
informed that they were sorry, septicemia had set in and she was
leaving from the suffering for good. I told them to inform my cousin
downstairs so that others could be called.
I stood beside my mother watching them take the life support systems
off. Clutching her hands, I felt her depart helplessly. She did not
clutch me back. In a matter of few minutes, she was gone.