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

Twitter

See how you can make a change at http://www.facebook.com/NatureForeverSociety

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

Mom's Last Christmas

It is almost midnight. The fairy lights on my Christmas tree wink naughtily at me as if to assure me company as I rest awhile on the living room couch, snug with my treasure trove of memories.

It is that time of the year when a bright paper star lights up my porch, a carol infuses nostalgia into the winter air and the warm fragrance of the fruit cake I am baking envelopes every nook of my home. The third batch of cake is rising happy and brown in my oven and it will be two more before I call it a day or shall I say night?

There is something so special about baking Christmas cakes through the night. It is something beyond the uninterrupted convenience that I cherish about these moonlit hours, the chores of the day being done and the children tucked off in bed. It is about the nip in the late night winter air as it mingles with vanilla, an aroma I know so well, a magical whiff from the past, for it filled our tiny suburban apartment  that Christmas eve twenty years ago. 

Mother lay on her rocking chair pale after her punishing medication for cancer. She was in pain .The cold had played havoc on her weak constitution and she had caught a nagging cough.

Somewhere deep within our hearts we knew that there wasn't much time. Over the past weeks, she spoke very little and seemed to involuntarily descend into the depths of a calmer state of relatively pain free semi consciousness.  We shuddered to think of the day when she would recede further into a comatose lull never to recognise us. After all, what else is mortality but to be dead and forgotten in the mind of your loved one?

December is a special month in Chennai .It is when the merry Carol singers of the church to the East of our suburban colony and the luminous lamp bearing maidens from the Lord Iyappa temple on the west cheer the neighbourhood with a harmonious medley of drums and cymbals.

It was also the month when mom baked cakes, not just for family and friends but even the cheery eyed Ghurkha boy and the young sweeper girl. But that year saw all of us spent in spirit. Oh to catch a momentary glimpse of our mother beneath the pale shadow she had come to be!

Those were the days when we spoke to her endlessly about the smallest details of our day and played her favourite songs, all in the hope of awakening a fond memory, which would bring a smile on her face and in turn light up our lives. Eager to fill her with more happy memories of busy December days, we decided to bake a cake, just the way mom had done unfailing done all the years of our childhood. After all, it was a ritual too sacred to be broken.

 Mom sat on her rocking chair at the entrance of our small kitchen instructing us in her feeble voice as the three of us sisters got down to the task.

The ingredients were precisely measured and mom’s baking ware ceremoniously brought out to commence the annual event. We burnt the sugar to a dark glossy caramel and took turns to beat up the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon to air like lightness. The dry fruits were floured so that they wouldn't sink and the mixture folded in to the perfect ‘dripping’, not ‘dropping’ consistency, just as mother insisted.

Soon the scents of Christmas rose from mom’s ancient sand oven while the cake baked to bonny richness. And as we flipped that flawless cake into the wire rack after many, many impatient minutes, we hugged each other ecstatically with our still floury hands.

That night tears glistened in my mother’s smiling eyes as she watched her daughters celebrate the perfection of their first cake. It was Christmas in spite of everything.

Three months later mother passed away. But, not without knowing, that she had passed on the baton to her three little girls, sisters, who would work on each other’s lives, to multiply the joys and willingly share the pain, and still remember to reflect on the true spirit of Christmas, in spite of everything.

That Christmas we woke up to the wisdom that we will one day pass on to our children – that it takes but love and togetherness to dispel the clouds of the dreariest days, like that splendid little cake we baked for mother’s last Christmas twenty years ago. 

My Mom Lives Forever

There is a secret place in my heart,

Wrapped in memories of sunshine days,

Where I am forever child,

And love means my mother’s face.

In there are walls where I scrawled,

Emotions in early innocence,

And guard a chest full of sepia moments,

Held captive in mind’s lens.

The teary tantrums of my first day at school,

Where my trusting hand mom you let go,

Then rushing with rage and relief into your arms,

As you kissed away every woe.

Those buttermilk summer times when we,

Relived tales of your girlhood days,

Many plum cake, December nights swathed,

In the mellow glow of your grace.

In weary times when cornered with care,

I just need to curl up and be still,

I set out for my sweet refuge to,

Let my soul drink to nostalgic fill.

And suddenly it seems so true,

 You manifest in the ones you love,

In faith and strife, in your children’s smiles,

In quirks and fetishes forever somehow,

But the fondest glimpses of you I see,

In father’s old eyes misty in memory,

Of spring memoirs turned autumn gold,

Some told yet many left untold.

        Asha Mathew 

In Celebration of Childhood

 In Chennai, January is like the white foam on the Pongal pot, February, the vividness of azure. March comes stained with pink watermelon flesh followed by blazing yellow months of Gulmohar blossoms, mangoes and many sunshine and Dog Star days. Then, there are the obscure medley months of heat and shower before November arrives clothed in grey.

November Diwalis are rarely dry in Chennai. Yet it takes more than a couple of dank evenings to douse the sparkler of a festive spirit out of the Chennaiite, I realise, driving through the restless T.Nagar roads. Oh the annual struggle and wriggle in and out of the several ‘storied’ Saravana’s and Pothy’s fulfilled with the joy of possessing a wallet’s worth of vanity...life is good, crazily though!

A little beyond the cloying glitter of firework shops and sweet stalls, I halt at the red lights, when he appears from nowhere, hastily knocking at my car window, with a flute on his lips, playing a rustically corrupted version of a Bollywood number. I will call him Krishna, my urban Indian street child, thin, hungry and dishevelled, bearing resemblance to the beloved Child God only in the darkness of his little form and the flute he plays. He moves on...

Somewhere in the narrow streets of Sivakasi, it is Krishna again slogging in a cramped room reeking of phosphorous and glue. His deft little fingers magically rolling out crackers and fireworks that warns in mocking irony, against the dangers of unassisted use by children. The child worker whose denied childhood seems too trivial a reason to affect the grandeur of celebration of good over evil, year after year.

Krishna, the child labourer who launches firework rockets that will deceptively surge heavenward only to plunge, Krishna, the impoverished Indian child at the signal selling happy books he can never read and heart shaped balloons to a loveless world.

His face smeared with the grime of the city, he prophetically reveals the truths of his world as he toils through the festival of lights that falls on the 13^th of November and a day dedicated to the child that falls on the 14^th. Strangely reminiscent of when his cherubic namesake the little Lord Krishna revealed the mystique of the cosmos the day he playfully consumed the soil of Gokul.

This poem is for you, child that knocked at my car window and my conscience. We owe you an answer.

Twilight

When dusk begins its drowsy descent

Clothed in surreal hues

A million lamps startle awake

This city, so worn, sleep shorn

There clad in incongruous rags,

A tattered school uniform

He wanders in that joyless twilight

Irony in the eye of that traffic storm

Strings of jasmine around his tiny wrist

And eager balloons, a hearty bunch,

He leaps ahead as the signal glows red

Beckoning blind car windows for rare mercy-little wretch

Now destiny blinks green in life’s random game.

He recedes to the wings in brief submission

To watch a while the world dazzle past

Light streaked mazes –night’s frenzied vision

Bound by the eccentric whims of a pole,

He flits in and out of a ceaseless chase

Measuring his worth in a fistful of coins

Ignorant of childhood lost to toil ridden haze

Soon weary darkness drags through its last lap

And life lulls a languorous while

Asleep between the shadows of fatigue and fate

His dreams surface in a half smile

Fragmented flashes of reclaimed innocence?

Or a strange slide show of denied deliverance?

Of gingerbread houses or an enchanted castle

Or just the elusive warmth of a hearth to nestle.

                                                                Asha Mathew

The Mahatma And I

There was a time when my ‘creative pursuits’ included scribbling little Haikus at the kitchen table because watched pots never boil and writing fond memoirs of an uncomplicated childhood while staying up late with my children on school project nights.

As a homemaker, my attempts to write with method and purpose were often blown aside in the frenzied rush of weekdays and buried deep under weekend piles of laundry. And so, prey to procrastination, they remained, isolated nuggets of creativity, sadly scattered over pages of diaries, unknown, unread, anonymous.

To start a blog was part of my New Year resolution. But for some strange reason, New Year resolutions overwhelm people like me into a state of jinxed inaction.

When I was a child my father once narrated the story of how he quit smoking. A young smoker, he stumbled miserably through failed New Year resolutions until that second of October fifty years ago, when he broke his enslaving addiction for good. I draw inspiration from his magnificent victory to break my sin of procrastination.

This blog is my little virtual space where my voice is heard for who I am for

‘I am the mother and the daughter,

Companion, sibling and spouse,

Everywoman in intuition,

Indian, in my instinct.’

A poetic tribute to the father of the nation

We live in times when the ‘Gandhian path’ has lost its direction from being a way of life to a political compulsion to acquire the Mahatma’s meagre belongings at international auctions.

I wonder if our very own saint of simplicity would have foreseen the day when his spectacles and a drop of his blood would be valued in millions rather than his deep vision and the spirit of sacrifice his simple life symbolised.

The Mahatma and I

One night as I tossed in bed,

Caught in the tempests of fitful sleep

I saw an old man troubled,

His chest bore wounds so deep.

He held in his hands a cloth,

So faded and stained as old

With such love and tender care,

As a father his child would hold

Curious for a closer glance

Of that form so familiar and bent,

I walked some unsure steps

To unravel what this strange scene meant.

Bapu! I gasped shaken

Deep in delirious confusion

He looked up at me for a moment

My frail, tear stained apparition.

He bade me to sit by his side

And stroked my little head awhile

And picked up with trembling hands

The tricolour, with a sad smile.

Many long years ago,

When the bullets rent my chest

Clothed in these colours I bid

Adieu to claim my rest.

But they tore open my scars

Into bleeding wounds once more

When they robbed my flag of the virtues

Dyed into the colours it bore.

Saffron so rare and precious

Holy hue of sacrifice and courage

But heed not my beloved nation

To the jaundiced beckoning of the savage

White is for ‘satya’, so pure

In thought and speech to be harboured

White fire that purged my soul

While with experiments in truth I laboured

The swaying fields of green

The smile on a farmers face

The freshness of life and faith

Green is for growth and gain

But where hunger consumes the tiller

Where he ploughs not but digs his grave

And the earth cracks deep heartbroken

None can this motherland save.

The wheels of the eight fold path

Lie trapped in the mire of corruption

The chakra of progress ceaseless

Spins in vain, in the ditch of no salvation.

The white man’s chains long broken

I still weep over India’s plight,

Abused in the hands of her sons,

While in blinded greed they fight.

And he sighed and wiped a tear

And took my little hands in his,

Looking deep into my eyes

While whispering this

This is the land that bears

The blood of a million selfless sons

Of lifetimes spent in toil

For a swaraj without guns.

I draw solace from the pride that beams

From a heart that adores his land

As he greets the fluttering flag

With a true, saluting, hand.

So saying he faded away

Into an unreal cloud of mist

But it cleared my mind of its fog

This once in a lifetime tryst

 Two golden threads to treasure

Of truth and tolerance divine

He wove into the fabric

Of freedom, yours and mine

Riches limitless to share

With one another in eternal kindness

To usher the whole of mankind

Into that sublime sea of deliverance.

Asha Mathew