Woman of courage

Two very strong woman,one brought up seven boys single handed put them through the best schools and colleges,despite the husband having passed on rather suddenly and with financial problems mounting.Most people would have advised her to compromise on the children's education,after all seven boys cant be easy but she held on,saw them though and in the process earned the love and respect of the sons who realised that what their mother had done could only have happened thanks to a strong person she was.She died this year in her 80s,not having married again she lived her life,running the family and seeing to her children.I didn't know her personally but i hear the pride in her children's voices,I hear it again in her daughter in laws voice (and that should mean something).

I know another person also in her eighties battling for her life in a city hospital while her daughters stand by and do the best they can under the circumstances.I know her personally.Most people would say she is difficult,has a mind of her own and the word I think would be feisty.I always like visiting her,small gossip sessions are great fun.She would rule over her house and know all the happenings in the building adding her own bits and pieces so it would sound interesting.I visited her some six months ago and keeping in mind her medical condition,I took some fruits.She wasn't too happy about it but as her daughter was around I played safe.I met her again three months ago.This time I threw caution to the winds and took along a box of chocolate biscuits.Her delight was reward enough,she is the same age as my mother but has had to deal with widowhood in a brahmin community which I know is not the easiest of things.She has smart daughters who manage their lives very well and that cant go down well with the community at large either .I remember soon after I was married she invited me to a pooja.Now I don't generally go to poojas but I went for hers (ones doesn't refuse this person) and I remember she was most disgusted by the fact that I has not worn the bindi that most married woman wore.The fact that I am christian and didn't need any of that didn't go down well with her.The long and short of it is that she marched to her pooja room,took out the red powder and made sure I had a red mark on my forehead.She would call from time to time and we would share cribs on our maid servants.I remember one profound remark she made to me one day when I asked after her health.She told me in no uncertain terms that she would beat her cancer and die of old age and nothing else.As she fights for her life I remember that sentence,I remember how inspired I was at her courage,her positive outlook on a life that wasn't easy and I pray that whatever she is going through now,the gods of her pooja room and the god that I pray to will give her the courage and strength to go through all this.It take guts to be the kind of woman these two are and I haven't come across many of them in my lifetime.As I grow older I keep my role models always in my mind.It takes courage to be a woman and I hope I will learn from these remarkable but very ordinary woman.

The bored nephew

Why no blogs? asks a 21 year old nephew and I realise that he must be truly bored and fed up of college,if the only reading matter he has access to is my blog.I promised him I would write about him as nothing seems to inspire me in the sweltering heat of this city.Of course that's not to say he inspires me but nevertheless as I have been party to a lot of his growing up one must say there is a story of sorts there.

He was a much awaited child (or so I think) and my sister being the fussy kind was most worked up during his birth.She was so sure that the boy wouldn't bother to make an entry into the world the natural way that she insisted on a C section to avoid any mishap.Unfortunately for her the date was anywhere between the 17th and 19th of March which she realised made him a piscean,which wasn't so bad in itself but if you had even the faintest belief in destiny and astrology then it wasn't so nice.According to most books,those born under this sign are dreamers (not acceptable in anyone least of all in a boy born into an Indian family) and having already had a sister born under the same sign made it even worse.Her first thoughts on his birth was that he may just turn out like the younger sister who happened to be not just a dreamer but a rebel to boot which is not the best of combinations.A lot of the family described me as moody,silent,mysterious and generally disagreeable so it wasn't a very good collection of traits to have and my poor sister was convinced that he would go the way of the younger sister.Well 21 years later I am sorry to say I had no influence on the boy except in the manner of a sharp retort and his uncanny way of not answering any question that he thinks may incriminate him in any manner.

We didn't have much contact with the boy over the years as he lived on one tea estate after the other but in the few times that we did visit he had turned out to be a bit if a spoilt single child,the only other thing beating him in the spoilt department was the family dog.Being animal he managed to get the better of the boy and in one single demonstration of this fact the dog choose to grab the cricket stumps and sit on it while the boy fretted and fumed that his game was spoilt.The dog of course had no intentions of parting with what he thought was a bargaining tool and the game ended with the dog walking away with all the glory.

He was in his early years a great fan of planes,cars,the sportstar magazine and the newspaper.The moment he learnt to read he would grab the newspaper and read the fine print on the sports pages.We all believed that he would end up playing cricket for the country,or become a racer etc,fond hope indeed but when one lives in Kerala the only options are to become an engineer or a doctor and in the end he did end up in an engineering college and save his honour in the land of his birth.

His ability to fend for him self (not a skill to be demonstrated when the mother was around,then he would play helpless,press all the right buttons and have the mother at his beck and call) was obvious from early days.He had an obsessive love of chocolate and after overdose after overdose he was told that he was allergic to the stuff.Naturally enough his mother banned any form of chocolate from his diet.But on holidays at our home,he would charm my mother and the moment his mother and i left the house he would demand that his grandmother bake a chocolate cake.Feeble attempts at a refusal met with some very sound arguments on the merits of chocolate,his mothers over protection on his behalf,how he needed to overcome his allergy (his logic was that to eat chocolate despite his body's protests,would eventually win the allergy war) etc and before his mother could get back home he would have had his cake and eaten it too.

The stories are never ending but I shall stop with this account which was till he was somewhere in the region of six or seven......we lost touch for a long time afterwards and pick up again after he goes to college....very few stories are known of that period and one is forced to piece together bits and pieces taken from various facebook updates and friends comments which unfortunately is no basis for a story so one hope that the boy enjoys this update and can find more stimulating reading matter in the near future