My Mother

I was told that my mother had cried when I was born.

They were not tears of pain from having pushed the proverbial equivalent of a camel through the eye of a needle.

They were not tears of joy, such as when I delivered my own children several decades later.

They were tears of disappointment.

She already had two girls and was hoping to give my father what every parent in India wanted – a son, an heir, an occasion to distribute peda to the whole world.

When the childless nurse in the hospital saw her crying, she offered to take me off my mother’s hands. It was fortunate that she refused, or I would now be manjo-ing bartan in a chawl somewhere, whilst one sister would be choosing jewelry at Bulgari and the other choosing which country to visit next.

It was tragic that she died only a couple of years later, so there is no way of knowing whether she got over the disappointment or not. In any case, if I had been that sick and having difficulty breathing, I wouldn’t have cared if I had a third daughter or a third cow.

Nina and Varsha inherited, sadly, her asthmatic genes. I inherited her physique and metabolism. She looks tall and thin in the few pictures I have of her. She never put on weight and lost even more when she fell ill. I can eat a tub of ghee and not gain an ounce...not that I would try it, or Dr. Ramirez would even let me. Sounds pretty gross anyway.

My cousin Dineshbhai stayed with us for a couple of years and he and Shardaben, his sister, still talk fondly of my mother, who was their mami. She had a natural elegance, and was kind as well as extremely generous and ready to feed and help anyone even remotely needing food or shelter. Sigh, where have all those genes gone?

Since I was only two when she died, I have no memories of her at all. I must have been pretty thick, because it was not until I was almost ten, that I suddenly had a thought. It was one of those ‘What were you doing when you heard Kennedy was shot?’ kind of moment. My cousin Mickey and I were playing with dolls in the garden, during a holiday in Matheran and she was talking about her mother. I remember stopping and thinking: What the heck? Where is my mother? This admission is embarrassing on two counts...one is admitting that I played with dolls in fifth grade and the second is being ten when I first realized I was the only one who didn’t have a mother.

Not that there were any shining examples of motherhood around, for me to wish upon a star for one of my own. There was of course Madrasfoi, the sweetest, most kind-hearted person in the world, who we met often. She treated us with the same love and affection she doled out to her own five children. But since I called her Foi, I assumed she was a Foi to her own children as well. This assumption should come as no surprise: proof of how dense I was has already been established as a precedent.

We didn’t interact much with adults anyway...even those related to us. We were more familiar with everyone’s bais, rather than everyone’s mothers...Sheilabai and Chandrabai and Rukhmanibai and Mickey’s old, diminutive, sodabottle-thick spectacled bai, who made the best vatana-nu-shaak and who shadowed her everywhere.

Between Ba and the bais, all the relatives and all the servants, I guess we turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.

It still would have been nice to buy a Mother’s Day Card.