My mother, like most mothers of people my age, is a woman in her mid fifties. Like most Indian mothers, she has always been very protective of me. Often in my mid teens, I mistook her acute level of protectiveness for a strong feeling of possessiveness and extra control on my life. Initially, I revolted, trying to break free. Then I realized, it only made her sad and consequently a little headstrong. Then I eventually gave up the fight. I started taking it as it was. And then I got smart and learnt to outdo her in certain ways.
I understood very early on in my life as a teenager that my mother could accept anything if one could convince her that it would help my career. I had realized, that even though she was a working mother, her daily hobby was to be involved in whatever I was doing. I remember, when I was in the tenth standard, my mother would build schedules for me with time slots assigned to all the disciplines that we would study at school. Not only that, she would strictly see to it that I followed all of that was listed in my schedule. She would come back from her school and ask me about every job assigned. In my eleventh and twelfth standards, she kept doing the same and additionally accommodating all the tuition classes I would take. She would sit with me in the study room and stay with me as long as I would be awake grading students’ notebooks from school. She would never leave me alone. She was always tired with the amount of work she did at school, home and then staying awake with me. So, sometimes when I would have to study deep into the night, she would lie down on the same bed I would study on, with a large Chemistry book under her head as a support. There were days when I felt bad for her, imagining the amount of work she was putting in and given the uncertainty that I would do anything good with my life. And then there were the more frequent days when I was angry with her for not letting me be, for not letting me breathe a little.
After school, I decided to leave for a different city for my college. The decision was taken keeping multiple aspects in mind. One of those aspects was to be away from my family and grow up independently. I needed that and I absolutely desired that. My being away never made my mother sad. She was so strong in her heart; someone (I still do not know who) or something (I still do not know what) managed to convince her that this was good for my career. But she would miss being around me and trying to tell me what to do every time something went wrong. So she would write letters to me and wrap it around the monthly medicine stocks that she would parcel to me to Delhi. In the letters she would sometimes send me a time table, much like before, where she would accommodate Organic and Inorganic and Physical Chemistry slots so that I would give equal attention to all of them. I would sometimes look at them and laugh. Sometimes I would get angry and shove them under the mattress somewhere. But I never understood where she got this immense urge to be there with me no matter what. I still never do.
There was this one thing that deeply hurt me often. Every time I would make plans to visit home, my mother would always be paranoid about the classes I would miss, the amount of work I would not get done when I am on vacation or how much I would offend my “boss” if I ask for break. It would always seem, as if she did not want me to come, which after a lot of contemplation I would understand is not true. She simply did not want me to face problems later on when I went back to work, she did not want me to fall out of my work routine. She is one of those teachers in her school that as a student I absolutely did not like, because they would never take a day off! I think in her 10 years of being a teacher in the same school, my mother has not taken more than 10 days of extra leave, other than what the school already provides. It becomes exceedingly difficult to make a person of the above mindset understand that while doing a PhD, if you do not take breaks, you do not survive! Anyway, I have realized, my mother loves her job. I am sure, 70% of the love for her job is for the work as a teacher that she quite nobly does. But 30% of the reason why she desperately loves her job is because, it keeps her occupied. I think it keeps her mind off of things she misses to think about, a large part of which was me, for a very long time.
My mother was born and grew up for most of her life in the city of Durgapur, in the state of West Bengal in India. Born as an elder sister in a not-so-well-to-do family of four siblings, two brothers and a sister other than her, and parents, with a sickly mother, she grew up to be the next mother of the family. For the most part of her life she was so busy taking care of others, first her siblings, then the husband and his family, and then me, that she never grew a passion of her own that she absolutely loved to do. When asked what is she passionate about, she ends up saying, “I love my job. I do not know what I would do if I didn’t have that”. When asked, what about the time before she had the job? She would say, “I would take care of you and the family”.
I was intrigued to write this piece today, when I observed something very strikingly different with my mother lately, and specifically after the hour long phone call that I have with her every Sunday. She has been very excited about a reunion that the girls from her batch in primary school have organized. The reunion took place this Saturday, 7th of December 2019. It was the first of its kind and my mother played a crucial role in bringing the girls together on Whatsapp and hosting them at our house on the eve of the reunion. She even took a day off from school, she said. This is the first time, perhaps since eternity, that my mother took a day off of her work, for herself and I could feel the excitement in her. She could not stop talking about the whole event this morning. She explained to me how two of the girls could not stop admiring how good my father has been to all of them and ended up clicking a picture with him in the middle with two of them on either side of him! I could not help feeling a little jealous myself after this! I do not really like unknown women tampering with my father! I wonder how my mother did not! She went on about how she told them about me and explained to me how everybody else’s sons and daughters have also left them to go abroad for work. How she anchored the reunion event of the night in their school auditorium. How women of her age managed to dance to songs with full costumes on. She could not stop.
It was nice to see her caring less about her work and me, even though for a day. I wonder, how much women of her generation got to think about what they wanted to do for themselves in life! I wonder, if anybody ever asked them! Maybe the answers would be astonishing and indeed, beautiful to know! If not this life, what would they have liked to do? I am interested. Aren’t you?
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