What ChatGPT does today to help users find answers to various queries, in our school days Wren & Martin played the same role for any confusion related to English Grammar. In our home, the biggest proponent of that brick red medium sized book was my dear ammi who strongly believed there can not be a better source to understand rules of the language than to refer the book written by the Englishmen themselves to teach the language to their children. Apart from expounding on the rules of active and passive voice, she had a special interest in helping her children with their science and maths homework, and I think she found it easier and exciting to balance the equations, than to make me understand the whole process of distributing the atoms in elements. I remember learning LCM more from her than from my Maths teacher, Mrs David in school. Nevertheless, they both agreed the subject was not for me or vice versa.
What I have mentioned is the minimal application or utilization of the Bachelor’s in Science degree she had meritoriously obtained from Osmania University – her education was the crown I always topped her introduction with whenever I spoke about her ardently, even my teachers marveled at the fact that my mother had done B.Sc and B.Ed. Back then because of the generational sociocultural conditioning, society lauded and hailed those mothers who took a deep dive in the ocean of motherhood, letting themselves flow with its currents and forgetting about their own existence and aspirations. My mother too, like her contemporaries who grew up watching Nargis in “Mother India” did the same – clipped her wings, veneered her ambitions of becoming a teacher with the glitter of sacrifice and successfully met the criterion of being an exemplary mother. She cooked for all but ate in the last, pushed her needs at the bottom and selflessly prioritized needs of her family, toiled but maintained a calm composure thereby fulfilling all the requirements to play the role of a good mother.
So how did she keep alive the vestiges of some simple pursuits and diversions, like good old friends which any individual needs to maintain sanity.
I remember the magazine section of Dawn newspapers on Sundays usually was thicker and carried articles of diverse interests, which could keep readers hooked for a couple of days. My mother would keep aside the folded Sunday Magazine by her bedside hoping she would steal some peaceful moments later in the week and enjoy reading some interesting articles like the ones on the history of Mughals or Gayatri Devi in bits and pieces, in between cooking and managing the house. Another such timid effort to catch up with reading were the sparse occasions when she accompanied me or my sisters for our Board examination or on the first day of college ready with her reading backlog and the reading glasses tucked in her handbag.
My baba was a bibliophile and in his collection he had an Urdu book with a dark green jacket titled “Mumlikat-e-Asifya” (Kingdom of Asifya), it was about Asaf Jah dynasty. Ammi had a close association with Hyderabad and as soon as she spotted it, she made it a point to add it to her long pending reading goals. Seeing her engrossed with reading, we the children too leafed through the book and though it was more about the serious topics of governance, history of Nizam and its political and administrative dimensions, we, funnily enough , only took interest in the mouth watering chapter on the rich cuisine of Hyderabad, and the lavish spreads at Nizam’s palaces.
These plain moments of respite – the me time- were small windows Ammi opened once in a while to catch some fresh air and take a break from the sweltering kitchen and multitude of household chores; just like an exhausted loom worker leaving the foot pedal to relax, like a weary juggler dropping the balls to wind down or a like an overworked technician pushing aside tools to stretch his benumbed limbs. Her rest and recreation idea was reading, watching films/TV, gardening, socializing – which sounds limited and too reasonable.But maybe for the homemaker within her, these self satisfying moments, in a hyperbolic sense, gave her the joy which Princess Ann gets in “Roman Holiday” when she runs away for a day in Rome to enjoy freedom from the regimented suffocating royal life.
Ammi had one life, I wonder if she lived it or spent it.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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