Shell shaped soap

“Do you remember ever eating a perfect mango when we were small?”, my cousin asked in one of our non stop going back to childhood sessions. We were talking about our grandparents and the numerous holidays that we spent with them. Summer holidays and mangoes – was there ever one without the other? We had this post lunch and dinner ritual. My grandfather would be at the head of the huge dining table with his wife ever present at his right and the posse of grandchildren around him. As soon as the lunch was over, he would call out to one of us to go get the mangoes. As soon as we would get up, my grandmother would say, “take the ones that have started turning bad”. The mangoes would be arranged neatly on hay in one of the rooms and we would go diligently search for the specks and dents and bring them back. The perfect ones would be taken out only when there were special guests at the table. But then, us kids would be banned from the table those days.

What my cousin said was true. It was very rare that we got to have a perfect mango, that we would sit, relish and slowly devour. Isn’t that what we normally do with most of the things in our life as well? The other day my son asked me, “amma, why do you make good food only when there are guests?” And I thought, ” oh my God, am I turning into my grandmother?” What he said was also true. The care and time that I spend preparing special dishes for guests rarely gets into the daily cooking which is anyway mostly delegated to the help at home.

Sometimes it takes an innocent question to shake you up. At times, you may not be so lucky. I remember reading a true life story in Readers Digest years ago. This lady finds her brother in law clutching a shell shaped soap with tears flowing uncontrollably from his eyes. Her sister,his wife had just passed away that morning after fighting for months against cancer. He tells her, “she was saving this for a special occasion which never came. She didn’t realize every day was a special day”. How true and how easy it is for us to forget this in our mad daily rush. It has been years since I read this but somehow the image of that shell shaped soap still sticks with me. When things go wrong, when people hurt me, when I feel down without any reason, when life seems to be too much at times, somehow this image keeps coming back to me.

So now, there are no shell shaped soaps in my bathroom, most of the candles in my house have been lighted at least once, I don’t save my new dresses for a special occasion and yes, my son gets his brownies and cup cakes often these days.

 

Happiness…

The first drop of rain on your forehead
Cool summer breeze on your face
A hot cup of coffee in one hand
And your favorite book in the other
Sun rising over misty mountains
And setting over the blue sea
Smell of hot dosas from mom’s kitchen
Feel of soft appams from grandmom’s hands
That perfect slice of mango in your mouth
Sweet nothings in the ears from your love
A gift received for no reason
A long forgotten voice out of the blue
A hug that says more than a thousand words
A look that conveys a million emotions
Happiness is all these
And then….
Two chubby hands holding you tight
At the end of a long tiring day…
….. absolute bliss!!

 

AMMI

Last two posts were about kids and parenthood. Did not want to go the rounds again even though it is Mother’s Day. So here is a book review, a book that is a son’s loving tribute to his mother:

“AMMI: letter to a democratic mother“

The fact that the author is a well known and loved raconteur is what attracted me first to the book and of course the not so usual theme – that of a grown up son writing to a mother who is no more. Well known screen writer and director of hindi films and television, Saeed Mirza, takes us through the life of his parents and some turbulent times. In the author’s own words, the book is

“a kind of refelctive, personal journey set in a background of idea, politics and history”

“This is a story about a young man and a young woman, and how they met and fell in love with each other, It is also a story about a time and a place.”

The narrative moves up and down in the form of anecdotes, short stories, part of a novel and sometimes poetry. The story starts in an old haveli in Quetta, ruled by Shahbobo, the quintessential matriarch that you expecet to find in such places. Jahanara is her granddaughter and here is where she meets her aunt’s brother Nusrat Beg, the scholar and idealist. Her father agrees to the match against his family’s apprehensions and the young couple move to Sibi, a dry an arid place in Balochistan. Their years there lay the foundation to a life long journey of love. Woven through the words is Jahanara’s inquisitive mind, het thirst for knowledge and her liberal, yet traiditional outlook against all that she comes across.

The story is interspersed with tales from the author’s childhood, stories of Aryabhata, Ekalvya, sufis, saints, maulvis and of course couplets by Mirza Ghalib. He then takes us through his growing up years, how English and everything western started influencing him, his years in the film school, incidents from his film making years, gripping encounters with unusual people met during his travels and so on. All through this are thrown around snippets of conversations with his mother on subjects as diverse as Vietnam war, intercaste marriages, the sikh riots, communal wars and the like.

The connecting thread through the myriad and diverse images is the author’s affection for his parents, specially his mother and his suppressed anguish that he could neither spend enough time with her nor talk to her as much as she would have wanted him to.The story is as much about him as his mother. The letters that he now addresses to her is a sort of penance for the earleir ones that

“were bahanas, excuses for the real thing. ‘Letters’, you said, ‘should be about things that people want to say. Not what they ought to say”

A must read!

 

Promise to my children :-)

Couldn’t help sharing this….showed this to my son and he laughed, but I guess he understood

 

Where do you draw the line?

Two things I’ve been working towards for quite sometime is done – moved to another job and my brother is married .

Errr…that was just an excuse for being lazy, hope to be unlazy enough to write a little more often Thanks again, Nancy for never giving up

Meeting friends and family after a long time was exciting and tiring too. One thing I realize is my patience is growing thinner and my tolerance levels are reducing at a very fast pace. Is that a sign of growing mature or old, I wonder!

Some of the new age parents that I happened to meet over the last two months makes me wonder what kind of a parent I am. We come from a generation where parents specially fathers were at a respectable distance, sometimes the wondrous benefactor, at times the frightful ogre who waits to pounce on us when we digress from the path that they set for us.Those days, the moment guests came on scene the lesser folks like us were banished to the netherlands, not to be heard or even seen. And woe behold anyone dumb enough to act smart to them in front of others.

Maybe I belong to another generation and an old school. In spite of being friends with the kids and giving them their space, we make it very clear where the line is – for everything. Crying and throwing tantrums doesn’t work, period. The drama might be acted out in public and I might be the demonic mother who doesn’t buy a chocolate for her kid, but that’s ok with me as long as my kids know what is allowed or expected and not. I still remember the day when I tried shouting back with loads of attitude at my mother. She didn’t utter a word till I finished my tirade. Then the lady turns around grandly and tells me, “I will talk to you again when you learn to treat me with respect”. It must be more than twenty five years now, but the day and her face is still as clear to me as a few minutes ago.

There is this little boy who is sitting crying from the morning. And guess why? The only thing he’ll have for breakfast is fried chicken! And his mother has sent her father off to buy chicken so that the boy will have ‘something to fill his stomach’. Then there is the couple who came visiting to my friend’s brand new apartment that she lovingly decorated over the course of more than a year. She was brave enough to have sofas covered in pristine white since her kids were relatively grown up and had the sense to know where they stand. The couple sauntered in with their three year old in tow who went straight to the refirgerator and plumped her hand into a gooey black forrest cake. Then she comes rushing back to her mother who is sitting demurely on the sofa…you can guess the rest! My friend’s daughter asks her, “Amma, if we had done something like this in some other house, you would have whacked us then and there. Why do you keep quiet?”
The next one started jumping up and down on our sofa screaming at the top of his lungs, threatening to kill his father – at 12 in the midnight!

I am far from being the perfect mother and my kids are further away from being a saint or an angel. They keep getting into and sometimes creates situations – some accidental, some deliberate and certain others I don’t even what to think about. My question is, aren’t we as parents at least supposed to tell them what is right and not? And when words doesn’t seem to work, give them a kick in the right direction?