Lesson
You touched every living thing with respect and care, and opened my eyes to the world around me. You didn’t set out to teach, you just showed me the how and why of life. Equally, you were my encyclopaedia and google, a search engine par excellence, facts and figures rolling out of that razor sharp mind in an absent minded way.
Inadvertently digging up and dissecting the earthworms in your rose beds led to a discussion about composting, vermiculture and the feeling of soil in between your fingers. When I brought home a dead goldfish I had caught in the little drain behind the house, you gave me a bucket and an aquarium so that the yield from my next fishing expedition made it home alive and I could watch the life cycle of a fish. A tiny baby bat I rescued from behind the biology lab in school found a home in a shoe box kept on the fridge. It lived for some weeks on watered down milk you patiently fed it through an ink dropper. The same ink dropper that fed many squirrel babies and stray kittens. You fashioned a splint out of a stick and gauze for a quail with a broken wing. The wing mended and the quail took flight. When you cut up a chicken or a fish for dinner, you took me on a free wheeling anatomy and dissection lesson, pointing out the windpipe connected to the lungs, the heart and liver, the gills and egg sacs, the structure of a fish scale. Years later, dissection lab in college was a breeze.
You loved ferns. You’d turn over the fronds to show me the spores arranged neatly down the ribs of each. You pointed out pupating butterflies hanging from leaves and tadpoles in the garden well. When I brought a frog indoors, and snails, you didn’t bat an eyelid. Instead, you showed me the structure of the snail’s shell and set me the task of catching flies so that we could see the frog’s tongue in action. You helped me bring in slimy frog spawn from the garden and monitored it with me till the tadpoles emerged. When a friend came calling with a sick rat snake in a shoe box, you kept a straight face, examined it from a distance and agreed solemnly that it would recover faster in my friend’s bedroom than in the Snake Park.
When our cat brought you early morning gifts, you thanked him kindly and only disposed of the gore when his attention was elsewhere. Any interesting species of lizard or bird skull was kept aside for us to study before being disposed of. I collected feathers one year, and we spent hours analysing each, with little back stories about the bird’s flight muscles. Another year, it was sea shells. Living by the ocean, I built up a fair collection. Once, we managed to saw through a conch and the spirals inside fascinated me – for years afterwards, i would doodle spirals on the back of notebooks.
Many years before I fed my babies cerelac and farex, you taught me to make up the goop into a smooth consistency and lace it with Faredol tonic to feed our dog’s underweight pups. You had helped her give birth under the bathroom sink, and I had watched, fascinated, as the rat like puppies slithered out in a rush of blood and clear fluid. The living room quickly became their nursery, messy and disordered. You gave no thought to housekeeping. Those mongrel pups were far more important than neat appearances and that’s something I learnt from you – life is important, not the appearance of it.
As a child, I remember you always humming or singing or whistling a tune. Your taste in music was super eclectic. Paul Mauriat, Harry Belafonte, Beatles, Queen, Fifty Guitars, Kishore Kumar, Jagjit Singh – you were my gateway to a world of sound. Eric Clapton, Deep Purple, Asha Bhosle – you would hum to whatever was playing around the house.
When I outgrew ABBA and bought my first Police album, you were whistling to Wrapped Around Your Finger in record time. You whistled beautifully – clear, sharp, in key. I wish I had inherited your whistling genes. You whistled to call us, different tones and rhythms for each of us. You whistled to the birds. You whistled when you entered the house – the dog and cats came running, we knew you were home and in control.
Sometimes I was embarrassed by your pursed lips and incessant humming. Friends would ask in wonder – is she whistling to Smoke on the Water? And I would wish you’d stop. And then, one day, you did stop whistling. It was something I really missed and that was when I understood that the real you was gone – what was left behind for the next 30 odd years was a smiling, active someone else. I whistle now. Mostly when no one is listening. There is plenty of eye rolling if I do it within earshot of the boys because I definitely did not inherit your ear for a tune. So I whistle in an empty house or while driving alone. The taxi drivers do a double take when they see me but they should be happy that they can’t hear me. I do it partly for you but mostly, I do it because music makes me as happy as it made you.
I wish I had played more music for you at the end. One evening, when you seemed more alert, we played hindi film songs. You sat quietly, but you were listening. Your lips moved as if you were humming the tunes in some far off place. I meant to record your voice but time slipped away and I never captured your dry voice, with a hint of exasperation and an edge of sarcasm, affection and humour laid over like an extra track.
You loved that I loved reading as much as you did. The summer I turned twelve, and complained that I had run out of schoolgirl stories to read, you threw open your book case and said – Go ahead, read whatever you like. And I did. Wilbur Smith, Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough. You never stopped me, not even when I picked up your trashy romance novels. I read and read and my mind is what it is today, because you opened that door and invited me to step through into a world of writing and reading. When I was nursing my babies, you told me that you used to balance baby me in the crook of one arm so that your hands were mostly free to hold a book or a crochet needle. I took that as a challenge. My babies learnt to watch me, cross eyed, while I read interesting passages to them from the current book. And I started on the first of my grown up cross stitch projects while my little boy napped next to me.
You had picked up cross stitch embroidery on a whim. An elderly neighbour, an erstwhile Rani of somewhere or the other in NorthEast India gifted you her entire stash – canvas, needles, thread, books. The two of you were kindred spirits in a strange new town. She was cantankerous and lonely and you always did have a soft spot for the outwardly crusty souls.
Knitting and crochet abandoned, you took up cross stitching with your usual determined attitude. You created these huge tapestries of roses and butterflies, and sat me down to fill in the background with black stitching. Those large star stitches – how I hated them. Many years on, you marvelled as my embroidery projects got progressively finer and more detailed. It was a rebellion of sorts against those big, ugly stitches I first learnt to embroider.
You were very proud of my work. I had almost finished my largest, most ambitious project when you left. I remember you running your hands over the Buddha’s Face, both of us pretending that you could see the design, when in reality, you could only make out a blur of colour. But still, you smiled and said it was beautiful. Perhaps you did see his gentle smile in your mind’s eye.
You never taught me to cook when I was young – you hated anyone crowding you in the kitchen and you would hustle me out – Go, go, get out, you’d say distractedly. But all the same, when I left home, it was with a journal full of your recipes, written in your neat handwriting. So I learnt from your written instructions, to cook the food we loved and that my family loves now. Caramel custard, silky smooth and light, chicken curry, heady and rich (no pretender makes it the way you did, no one could), the best dhansak ever. You loved my honey chicken, hated the vegetables I insisted you eat at my table. You grumbled but swallowed a few mouthfuls to stop my lectures. You ate with your fingers, neatly, elegantly, quickly. I wish I’d paid more attention but my head was often stuck in a book at the dining table. You couldn’t complain because all too often, your head was stuck in a book too.
You were a teacher for a large part of your life. You were popular with your students. I think you must have taught them well. You certainly taught me so much, so well. Lessons in biology, history, life, living. You taught me to think for myself, to never back down from a wrong, to be loyal and trustworthy, to stand up to bullies. To forgive but never to forget. You did not suffer fools easily. You were a hard woman, stubborn and wilful, vengeful and unbending. I learnt some of those things from you. But I learnt from you to be sensitive and caring and kind too. Someone accused me once of turning out just like you. Interfering woman, like your mother. What that accuser (who should have known better) interpreted as interference was often a genuine caring for others, a striving to help someone in need, a formidable intellect trapped behind failing eyes and a failing body. And since you were twice the human he ever will be, I took that accusation as a great compliment.
This writing came too late to share with you. But in part, it is because of you. And I thank you for this gift, and for your gifts of loving music and literature and nature. You always found it tough to express your emotions or articulate what you were feeling. But you loved me well and I never doubted that for a moment. Thank you for love and laughter and life. I wish I had said it all earlier. But I am my mother’s daughter and talking about feelings and emotions is not what I do best either. And you see, I know that you know. You knew it all along.