FIRST LADY

I have met many people and interacted with them. Some are pleasant, while others are not so. Nevertheless, in the crowd of me too people, just a handful are exemplary.

 One such person is my friend’s mom. His name is Hari. He has an elder and a younger brother. Mani was vibrant, full of energy, and had a booming voice. He was big made. Younger than I by five years, he was buoyant and could laugh at the slightest stimuli.  I used to hang around in his house. His mother was a very nice person. A very plain looking woman, her beauty lay in her brown eyes. They radiated warmth, and affection.  Having three teenage sons, who were ravenous most of the time, was quiet challenging. She was a teacher in a school. Managing profession and balancing the demands of motherhood, sat lightly on her. She could multitask easily. Those were the days when people used only the city bus as transportation.  So it took tremendous amount of energy, to travel to school, and back, in the hot humid whether.  But the demands of daily routine hardly showed in her.

She was selfless by nature.  Her joy was her husband and children. Her husband was a kind man, employed with the government.  She told me once, when she was pregnant with the third son, there was a  financial crunch in the family. She fed her two children and husband, and mostly starved, as there was little to eat.  To deliver the third child she had to come to her mother’s place, as was the practice followed during those days. As she boarded the train, she told her husband about her situation-imposed starvation. His eyes full of tears, he bade his wonderful wife a farewell.

Those days most of the marriages were arranged. Prospective bride grooms, would visit the girl at her place, with his parents. If the pair liked each other, the parents would get down to the nitty gritty of the wedding. Many men had rejected her hand in marriage, as she was plain looking. She was very sad at these rejections, and pleasantly surprised when one of the men had agreed to marry her without hesitation.  That is why she loved her husband a lot.

Her sister was in the United States. Even as early as 1972, she had started planning the future of her sons. She first left for the USA, and stayed with her sister. Her first son, who had completed his MBBS in India, joined her there for his further studies. Hari completed his Engineering and joined them later to pursue a career. Her last son, a graduate from IIT soon followed them. Her husband was the last to join them. Now the entire family is the USA.

She was the first woman I had seen, who was in a sense a complete human being. Affectionate, traditional, professional, ambitious, she played all the roles of woman hood to perfection. Be it as a wife, a mother, a mother- in- law and a grandmother.  She was also a very kind woman, who could be a good friend to a teenager like me.

I met them many years later, when they visited India. She had not changed one bit. She bonded with my wife within minutes, and presented two shirts, one fro me, and the other for my son.  They had a light dinner with us and as we said good bye to them, a feel of maternal affection, wafted from her persona and lingered with us for many days.