A mother's story

It was pitch dark outside. From time to time, she peered out hoping that my father would be home soon. Summers in Koppa meant power cuts and power cuts meant letting in the deep darkness of the jungle inside the house. The noises outside became louder as the night wore on. Strange shadows lurked in places the candlelight couldn't reach.  The crickets let out their call. The silence that descends heavily and suddenly at night in the villages surrounded the house. Unlike Mumbai, where silence is a chimera and darkness is a mere memory of the womb. Moths flickered around the candlelight. She tried to go back to reading her book, but all she could think of was her fear. The fear that gripped her every evening, until my father's bike could be heard from the distance, its powerful sound announcing him before he had reached the village. She always kept a heavy stick and a powerful hunting torch close to her in the evenings. Outside, very close to the door, she heard howls. The Jackals were howling. She started weeping. She was only eighteen and far away from home, from the comforting chaos of Mumbai and the solace of having no fewer than a thousand people within a kilometre. Here, the nearest neighbours were at least a kilometre away and the surrounding wilderness was ominous.  She cried for a while, waiting for the sound of my father's bike. And then, she wiped away her tears, decided it was silly to be afraid and has never been afraid since.

By the time her first daughter was born, she was used to the lifestyle. Father would leave for town to work at the bank and wouldn't be home till late evening. She had the day to herself. She would take out her textbooks - she was studying a long distance undergraduate course from the Bombay University - and immerse herself in her studies. She has seen some interesting things. Like a golden cobra that was sunning itself outside in the warm afternoon. She says it is the most beautiful sight she had ever seen and the only time she was able to see a golden hooded one. There was no dearth of snakes in Koppa. Mother has expertly taken us out of our cradle in the nick of time when snakes came too close for comfort. The snakes meant no harm, indeed they were mostly rat snakes who only wanted to feast on the frogs near the windowsill. The monsoons saw us hounded out by insects. Thousands of larva and different kinds of worms would come crawling into the house. Other insects too would find their way in through the holes in the mosquito screen on the windows. Large geckoes would scuttle about and cockroaches would fly. Our toilet had mushrooms and ferns growing in it too :- ) It was like the jungle was trying to reclaim its land from humans in little ways. But my mother was undaunted. She slowly found ways to co - exist with what was around her. She grew vegetables that could win prizes if she had contested, grew flowers and orchids and learnt much about how herbs could be used in cooking.

Every morning Bhujangrao from a nearby estate would walk his horse past our house. He and father would be engrossed in a conversation about farming while my mother, unnoticed,  would surreptitiously feed the horse little mounds of jaggery. One day Bhujangrao came home and gestured to the horse,  and said,  "he never budges from this house whenever we come this way, do you feed him anything?" and my mother coyly told him about the daily ritual of jaggery. She had read somewhere that horses liked sweet things.  Turns out he liked it a little too much!

Mother didn't know Kannada when she first moved to Thirthahalli in Karnataka. But she did learn it in Koppa when my father got a bank transfer. Little Radhika or puttakka as she was fondly called, became my mother's teacher. Our landlord’s  daughter Radhika, was a pretty five year old. They played and mother helped her with her lessons, and in turn she taught mother to read and write in Kannada. So, Mother borrowed books, read voraciously and now, her Kannada is impeccable.

Koppa and its surroundings have tiny little brooks and waterfalls that are a pleasure for youngsters. Mother and father would bundle off all things needed for a picnic on my father's royal enfield, join up with a couple of friends and their wives and be off on their motorcycle. Those were different times back then, never as packed or short as they seem now. They brewed wine (gooseberry wine is one of our favourites), grew mushrooms (but weren't brave enough to taste them!), and did experiments in natural farming. Good times!

1991 was a tough year. When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, there were photos being circulated of LTTE leader Prabhakaran. My father resembled him. My mother would wait anxiously for him to be back. There were no mobile phones back then. And father would be away at far off villages on work. Newspapers would bear an unclear print of a man who looked a lot like my father and announced a reward for his capture. Every evening she would heave a sigh of relief once he was back. Her one year old daughter, blissfully unaware would give her a fresh set of troubles during the day. She would overturn furniture and crawl over dangerous things, drop packets of flour or cocoa powder on the floor and smear them everywhere, and wake my mother from her nap by trying to prise open her eyelids and asking her if she was asleep. We make her feel very guilty about these things now that she can answer to them :-)

1992 was even more nerve-wracking. I was born during the Babri Masjid riots in Mumbai. Mumbai is not a good place to be in, during times like these. My uncle was lathi-charged when he had to go get something essential for my mother.  Mob violence is something I can never forgive.  

She is one among the bravest persons I have met. She managed to reconcile herself to a very different world and learned to adapt and thrive. I think most mothers do. So I'll end here with a quote by a fictional mother who could be all too real, Ma Joad, from the Grapes of Wrath, “Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head. Man, he lives in jerks-baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk-gets a farm and loses his farm, an’ that’s a jerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on-changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.”