Thank God you always smelled nice!

Since your’s is the only smell that is indelibely etched on my memory, imagine if it wasn’t a pretty one. How traumatized I would have been. And nobody would have known too. What’s up with this kid, why is he scrunching his nose nose all the time? No answer. And it would all have been your fault, that you didn’t talcum yourself enough, or just ate too much masala. May be I would have ended up liking whatever you smelled like Ma. That is very likely too, but that would have been a travesty of a different kind though. Why does this kid never take a rinse? No answer. 😳!! But you saved me all this trouble, by smelling “so nice” all the time. So thank you.

Being the only girl child of doting parents, among five brothers, clearly you weren’t raised to cook food for 4 large hungry men in a household of limited means. But you valiantly fought and cooked day in and day out, nevertheless. And we didn’t help either. Neither by letting you know what we wanted to eat that evening, nor by stopping eating till the vessels were empty and shiny. You are a growing boy, you would always say, patting my back when I polished off gobs of food without such a thing as looking up. Food that you made all afternoon after spending the whole day at your college. I forgot to thank you, even though I didn’t forget to burp. That was enough for you though. Just that much, was a fair exchange for hours and hours of toil and turmoil, deciding what to cook, buying the subzi and daal on the way from college where you came back from, in hand-pulled Rickshaw. On top of that you barely knew how to to cook and put the stuff together. It wasn’t your first, second or third choice to spend the evening doing. But you did it seven days a week, 365 days a year, your ear to the ground for that satiated burp. That was somehow enough. And you got four of them, one from each of your three boys and another from Papa. Papa was nicer I think. He did look up at you once in a while. He didn’t have too many words, but you were in his awareness zone. Unlike your three ladla betas. 

You are short too. At 5’3” that food that you made and we ate reletlessly, got us to outgrow you physically in a very rapid order. But we didn’t know you were short. Because somehow inside you always stayed taller than all of us put together. My dad who is over 6 feet, seemed like he switched heights with him when you got upset. And you got upset plenty. He got frazzled when you got upset. We never knew why though. We could hear the upset-frazzled dance, we could see switching out of physical height and we could feel angst. But you never ever unloaded on us why you got upset at him. That was kind of nice. So we still think he walked on water and jumped high buildings. He did, didn’t he. You looked at him that way plenty of times. That’s how we knew. That’s how we still know.

You also didn’t know science and math. Not the 12th grade engineering preperation level or any level really. But you knew to bring warm milk and just sit around while I tried to tackle that shit. That made it easier I think. Calculas has a way of melting away into more tractable problems in face of a mother by your side armed with glass of warm sugared milk, at midnight. Calculas also tires out I think. But not you Ma. Not you.

I heard you singing and dancing in the ladies sangeet a few times. It was basic, but you clearly enjoyed singing those banna songs before someone’s wedding in chorus with other ladies and even dance a few steps. You could dance for sure, but only a few steps. Those you repeated and repeated. But you danced happy when your turned round and round with the right arm giving sweeping motions. Those sarees were pretty too. Light pink or some such shade. I was little and so the ladies had let me sit there. I was happy that you could dance enough for me to not get embarrased. But what was with keeping on repeating the same steps. hahn!

You were so pretty. But we didn’t know you were pretty. You were nice, but we didn’t know you were nice. We just knew you were Ma and you were our Ma. That blanket gave us all we needed. It meant there was food and there was shelter and kindness and love and caring and fussing and all the rest. Who cares to know if air exists, when it does really exist. It’s only makes it’s presence known by it’s absence. Thankfully, for us, you were and are present. That’s a lot of doing Ma at 78. So thank you for that. Even though I did not then, I look at you as pretty and nice now. Because now, I know what pretty and nice looks like. It looks a lot like you.

So in the end, neither were you a great cook, nor could solve algebra, nor did we know you were pretty, nor were you tall … you were none of these. But you were you a Mom, who fed us yummy, nutritious food, who stood tall, who conquered our math ghosts, who helped us hold our father in high esteem and who was and is the prettiest woman on earth. That takes some doing Ma. And you have been doing the doing, being the being and living the example that I lucked out to have around me.

So thank you Ma. Happy Mother’s Day.