Reminiscing mother at her 100th

Reminiscing mother at her 100th 

 My mother would have like to live longer than 92 if God's miracle permitted. Throughout her life, she preserved her will to live, and rejoice life, like spring flowers, fresh and scented. She faced life as well as death with courage and compassion, bubbling, and blustering. Brutally skeptic often, she remained zealously religious all her life. My lack of faith disappointed her but she admired my honesty. Barely educated, she used an earthy sense of wisdom and a wry sense of humor as a shield against life's complexities. She used her love and faith in people to shoulder early widowhood and attendant adversity. Blessed with a healthy constitution, we never saw her bedridden well into her 80s. Work was her solace and release from the grief of being a widow at 40. 

 My memories of my mother are hazy and blurred since my aunt raised me in the adjacent household. As if someone else, I hung around her at a distance, not certain if she was my birth mother. She also treated me with deference and politeness a birth mother does not afford. I moved into her home in a homeless state when my aunt passed away. The sole memory of those days is her relentless and backbreaking work running a household. She continued treating me with the same attitude of being someone special and this spoilt me, branding me as a lifelong spoilt brat. Our closeness grew once I began helping her with errands and chores easing her life. Later in life, I turned out to be her sole go-to person for anything she needed. 

My father's untimely and sudden death altered my mother’s life irrevocably. Meager family income and many mouths to feed tragically bewildered her beyond her strength. Her armaments to undertake daily battles and occasional wars were limited to her belief in God, faith in the goodness of people, and the capacity to work hard. All her children battled their own demons of the vulnerability of having lost father and extended little or no support to her. I cannot begin to imagine how lonely she must have felt? How terribly lonely? Having joined her only after she became a widow, I was lost in my expression of love and compassion towards her. A formal and unbearable distance between us even prevented me from hugging her. Amidst all the turmoil around her, she retained her sanity to ensure that the household functioned on an even keel and all her children carried on life as they were meant to. 

 My mother spent long stretches of her life in our home, compensating for the warmth that I had missed as a child when I grew up next door. An unending friendly banter and arguments are what defined our relationship. She would take all my teasing seriously and we will argue for days. Such a relationship never prevented her to deftly get her way with me; repair her spectacles, take her to the temple, visit her friends, bind her books, almost anything. We would argue in the most ludicrous ways; what is right and wrong, who should do what, did God exist, and going to heaven and hell. At the end of it all, she knew that the more I lacked faith in God, the more my faith in her expanded. 

 Her life's happiest period was the two years when we moved her to our native place. She blessed my wife and me endlessly for this gesture. I visited her every week that delighted her to no end. I would sit across her doing my work listening to her non-stop talk about life and limbs. All the people from her past in that town visited her. She would come alive with joy as she updated herself on the town's gossip. I missed her departure by 12 hours as I returned to Mumbai in the evening only to go back to her lifeless body. I wish she had gone on to live till 100 giving me that extra eight years of bantering and arguing. 

 But then who am I to expect such a thing?