Tag: mother

Day 1 : Life lessons – calm and polite

On By Indu PatikkalIn Children, growing up, life, opinion, parenting, Random thoughts, realizationsLeave a comment

I was cleaning the fridge today. A yellow microfiber cloth in hand I set out for the daunting task around 3pm. There were a number of expired bottles of various shapes and sizes. There were some frozen circles of milk glued to the shelves, some masala rings, rotten vegetables and what not. I know you must be thinking yew!! What an untidy woman. Thank you!

The shelves wiped, the trays wiped, the cheese box wiped, the trays on the doors wiped, the huge vegetable tray wiped! Phew! Why can’t this be just one shelf?

I scrub away for one hour, two hours and finally open my lower freezer door. Chocolate frozen from some chocolate cookie dough glued to the bottom of the tray. I bend down, sit down and wipe away. This stubborn partition piece of rotten plastic refuses to budge from its place. I snap it out and think – I got you sucker ! After I finish wiping for another twenty minutes or so, oh how much I hate chocolate cookie dough by now.. the rotten dough comes off nicely and my trays are as white as snow ❄️.

So this sucker plastic piece needs to go back in. I try to push it in, just like it was and the sucker decides on a revenge game with me ! Me ? Me ! Just as I thought I put it right back in, the suckers heinously snaps in place with my thumb inside.. OOOOOOUUUUUUCCCHHHH!! The sucker really got even now. I yell and yell and my kids come running asking “Amma, are you ok?” The perfunctory question kids have learnt watching misleading movies. My wiggle my thumb out and let that sucker die inside the freezer to deal the rest with my husband. This is a man’s job after all!

While I clean the rest of the freezer, my fingers going numb, I crib about everything between the sky and the core of the earth. I go yada yada yada and even bring in how irresponsible the kids are about taking a bath. I really don’t know the connection, but I got choked up as well. I rattle and rattle and make so much noise. Both my kids very intelligently, stay away! Just as I lift the washed tray to go back into the fridge, I hit a glass and it shatters! Wow!! My elder son comes running and asks “What broke?”. He fetched the broom for me, silently watches me clean up. After about ten minutes he asks – what should I do? I tell him to clear the trash. He does it ever so obediently and promptly (on other occasions he needs a minimum of five reminders).

He comes back and waits another two minutes and extremely calmly asks – is there anything else I should do? I say no. And he asks so politely, “so now can I go back to doing my project?”

And I am stumped! At that precise moment I feel the growth of my baby into a mature youth who knows how to handle the situation.

Life lessons I learn everyday.

#metoo

On By Indu PatikkalIn Random thoughtsLeave a comment

I learnt about what #metoo means when I looked up a Malayalam actress’s post. She is a celebrity and can put it. Nobody would care because she is famous and not married. But what ties all women who have had a bad experience to narrate is that they know the feeling, the agony, the umpteen times they have tried to put it out of their system. But it stays like rotten fungus, etched in her memory. The bastard ( I have no lesser word for them) forgets it like eating breakfast that day. 

How many Indian women from middle class families would admit that they were at some point in their life sexually assaulted or abused or whatever crap one wants to call it, for fear of the reaction of their immediate families? Even if the woman has an open mind does her partner or family have an open mind to accept without contempt that the woman close to them went through a harrowing experience which they can’t even begin to imagine? Many men probably attach behavior patterns of the woman with this past experience as if she had a say in the act. She was probably less than ten years of age when she didn’t even recognize her body parts. She was probably a woman with dreams that were crushed because of the bastard’s whim. She was probably a woman who has sons the age of the bastard. There is no particular age that a woman is targeted which exponentially increases the horrendous crime. 

The basic question anyone can ask these bastards is – don’t you have a mother. There is no other way you could have been born and this act is an ultimate insult of her. There is a vast generation of men who are negatively impacted by pornography. They probably don’t have basic sex education or are deprived of sex itself that they launch what they see on the one they can land their hands on first. This is the only part where I don’t believe in karma. It was not her karma to be subject to such a heinous act. Everyone remembers the woman, nobody remembers the bastard. The best example is the Malayalam actor abduction case. Justice is delayed to a celebrity who has the connections so what will happen to a common man. At the mention of her name there will be more perverts who will say with lewd eyes – wasn’t she the one who was abducted and assaulted. There will be few who at the mention of the bastards name will say – wasn’t he the one who harmed the modesty of many women? Somehow he becomes the hero. There is a whole generation of men waiting to get their hands on the videotapes of the assault to satisfy their whatever..

There is a layer of rotten bastards living in today’s world. They should be dug out and killed to stop this menace. Everyone keeps shouting slogans about equality, more power to woman and all that bullshit, what every woman needs is her basic human right to exist as a human being without fear – even if she is a baby. The situation is so disgusting that the only place safe for a woman is in the womb as a foetus. Everything else is risky.

I am in support of the recent movement of educating our sons. Yes they are the ones who should be taught to respect a woman, every woman! 

Sex education is a serious thing and should be taught in schools so that children don’t have to find out what vagina means or what sex means hiding under blankets browsing books they sneaked or googling behind closed doors. It should be talked openly in homes so that they learn to think that sex is a natural phenomenon and not a taboo.

All this while it’s the women who have been fighting, when will the men come down to fight for and protect the women? Why don’t we have more men in the streets raising slogans about keeping her safe? It doesn’t mean women shouldn’t fight for their rights but if there is vast majority of men who believe that women should have their human rights why aren’t they trying to fight the minority of men who resort to such dastardly acts? Why are they opinionated in silos? Why can’t they conjure up forces to pressurize the governments to fastrack these cases, and ensure the bastards are gravely punished so that the next guy who wants to commit this crime thinks atleast for a second before doing it? 

Change still seems like a very distant dream. But I sincerely hope that there is hope. If we do our part today maybe there will be a better tomorrow.. 

With prayers…

Cooking

On By Indu PatikkalIn growing up, Happiness, life, opinion, Random thoughts, realizations, WomanLeave a comment

Cooking is an art – whoever said this, uttered the truth. When you sketch, you need to feel the paper, use the correct pencil, every stroke makes a difference. When you make jewelry, you need to pick the correct beads, string them in the right sequence to make something beautiful. When you paint, your canvas, paints, brushes, strokes all of them matter. Its the same with cooking. You need the right utensils, spices, oil, vegetables/meat, sequence of events and above all, the P word – Patience.

Like all art forms, cooking needs an enormous amount of patience. If the onion is a tad bit undercooked or overcooked, it makes a difference to the end product taste which is probably another ten steps away. There are people who cook in a hurry and yet get it right most of the time. Yet, the speed is not in the cooking, its the speed in multitasking or tricks to get to the end product sooner.

My oldest memory of cooking goes back to that tiny 100 to 150 sq ft of space lines with built in shelves of cement on the right side, a sink again made of cement on the other, with stands on either side to keep the washed utensils, on the left side. There was a tap that opened into the sink, unfortunately, water never flowed through the tap. There was a plastic basin or bucket on the side, from which we fished out water to wash the utensils. This basin and back up plastic drums was religiously refilled everyday morning by my father who carried the water up two floors before he went to office. The two sides was connected with a wooden plank of about 10 feet by 3 feet on which we kept the stove. This was the third side of the kitchen. Initially this was a single electric coil, till we became modern and got a gas stove that had an automatic lighter. My father uses this stove even today!

The right side of shelves was lined with red circular plastic containers with off-white lids. These were remains of some washing powder we bought in those days. Then there were a couple of huge aluminum canisters to store rice, atta. There was a green basket to store onions and potatoes – this again still lingers on in my father’s kitchen today. There were Red Label Tea plastic bottles to store the smaller volume items like dal etc.

It was sweaty during summer. There was a small window which she opened to let some air inside, but quickly shut off because the gas flames would go any which way. The kitchen was always crowded except for the center area where we sat down to cut the vegetables or knead the flour or roll out the chapathis. There was a waste basket in one corner, which was cleared out everyday at the bell of the worker who cleared out trash from households. As soon as the bell rang, we would carry that bag of trash and run down two floors to hand over the valuables. Later, we got modern and played catch by throwing it from the second floor at the direction of the worker.

My mother cooked here three times a day for us for almost thirty years! I know now, that I would have hated it. I am sure my mother was not a fan of the kitchen she had to succumb to. I wouldn’t have been if I had to cook in there for thirty years. But she made sure there was food on our plates.

It was a very humble dwelling compared to what I cook in today. Yet the lesson I learnt about cooking has not changed. The single most important one being – whatever you cook, you need to cook it with love. You can add the best spices, give it all the time you have, yet when you cook with love, the end product tastes the best. Is it the love for food? No. It is love for the fact that you are going to feed someone. In the Malayalam movie Usthad Hotel, Anjali Menon wrote for Thilakan – when you feed someone you should fill their heart.

Whatever my mother felt in that kitchen one element for sure was love, coz she filled our hearts every time we ate.

Love you Ma!

 

 

 

Chord

On By Indu PatikkalIn TranquilityLeave a comment

Faces forgotten
Words long gone
Look them up here and there
Old pictures and words
Some people exit without a trace
With known intent, sometimes
The chord stays, a thin one
Weathered by time
To remind you of its strength
Long ago.

Nuts and bolts

On By Indu PatikkalIn Random thoughtsLeave a comment

I found this box in my mother’s bag. My mother passed a year ago and while goinggoing through her bag found this box which was once packaged with nuts served on domestic indigo flights. On one of my travels many years ago, probably from trivandrum to bangalore, I had bought this box of nuts for my parents. 

It’s contents span a lifetime and attributed to people she holds dear to her heart. 

There is a passport size phot of my brother in Bishop Cottons uniform. The struggle she went through to get him an admission at bishop cottons is something best forgotten. She paid a donation of 5000 rupees way back in 1989, at her own intuition and will so that my brother would get the best education possible.

The passport photo of me was taken for my engineering college admission, in 1995. Getting me into MIT, Manipal was a big step for her. Payment seat with a fees of 40,000 rupees per year. I can only imagine the jitters she must have had thinking of this colossal amount she had to make every year along with my brothers bishop cottons fees. I got the last computer science payment seat that year. Was she worried about sending me away from her nest, I don’t know, I was engrossed in getting that last seat. 

The picture of her and a boy, is before her marriage. She had come to bangalore to help her sister take care of her son, my cousin, Manoj. He remained her first child always. This was probably 1972..

The next picture is of her, Manoj and his younger brother Babu.. she learnt her first lessons of motherhood from them. They were very dear to her. 

The dice is something I got for her when she came to visit my family in the US, and we went to Las Vegas. Oh! How much fun she had at the slot machines.  By then my elder son was born and this memento says “Grandma’s casino, Las Vegas”.

The kushtex fabrics book is her phone and address book, her link to the world. This was a complimentary gift from a company whose fabrics my uncle and aunt sold in wholesale at Bangalore.

Then her bank card, hospital cards and some papers.  She has carried these with her for innumerable years, adding to the collection over the years. These little things mattered to her. Today she carries them in her heart, overseeing each one of us, visiting us, assuring us that she is here, somewhere around us.
Lots of love, to the woman, because of whom, I am, who I am..

Going home…

On By Indu PatikkalIn Random thoughtsLeave a comment

The last time this big Bird took me home, the cold body of my mother lay in an ice box, waiting for my brother and me. Her soul gone. The warmth of her embrace now cold from the ice. Her smile faded, forever. I was dreading the journey. I didn’t know myself for the moment and the hours afterward I see her. It was the worst day of my life.
It has been a year. During this one year she visited me a few times. I felt her presence as my husband, children and I reunited after my son’s week long summer camp. I felt her smiling beside me as I plucked the first vegetable from my garden. I felt her each time I cooked her recipe. I felt her as I sewed my first handbag. I have felt her, more powerful than ever.
This time I am going to help free her soul, so they say. It maybe a ritual, but maybe it will bring closure to the mourning. I don’t know, once again, how I will feel. But, maybe it will help me get over the grieving and celebrate her life. I will continue to feel her presence, I know, till my last breath. She will be there with me, holding my hand when I am weak, rejoicing with me at my successes, watching over me and keeping me blessed.
I dread going home, for the first time. It’s the first time, that I will be going home without my mother. It’s not that thought that I am dreading. When I open her cupboard, will I catch her smell? Will it feel like she is there, yet not there? I don’t know. Another uncertain period of life, where I don’t know myself.
I miss you Ma, today and everyday for the years to come. I wish I could hug you, just once more.