Into her world....all over again!

The strong aroma of the filter coffee and the sound of water flowing from the garden hose pipe tells us that she is up for the day. She will loudly greet the milkman and wish him a good day though she doesn’t buy his milk. For the next 2 hours the house is reverberating with all the devotional songs(all of us know them by heart by the sheer power of sound!). Born into a Palakkad Iyer family,my mother complemented my dad in every way. She is impulsive, can multitask amazingly, talk her way with the veggie vendors, intuitive, spirited, very original, absolutely artistic, reads all the tamil magazines(Mangayar Malar ranks on top!), cooks the best meal I have had so far and the surprise is she loves outdoor sport-plays badminton very well for her age. She is a bag of unpredictables and yet so predictable in so many other ways!



Her sense of aesthetics!

It is her conversations with people outside that is most hilarious. Now if you haven’t seen my bro and me you are likely to think we were both prodigies in the making;)! I thank my stars for all the confidence that she managed to instill into us by just being immensely proud about us (even for the way we argue with her!). Every single medal or certificate will find the centre place in the showcase at home as she has to brag about it to her visitors who are normally family friends but it also includes people who briefly visit our homes-this is the most embarassing part though(now these include the occasional visit by the man who climbed the coconut trees, jasmine vendor, newspaper man and alike!). All these people still think we are probably assuming the position of the President of the countries we live in as they for the last 3 decades have looked at us in total awe for no apparent reason!! Btw by now you know that bragging about children is a family trait;)


Her world revolves around us and then of course the rest of them in the family! She was smart enough to make us believe that our secrets were safe with her and will never reach appa. She was a superb actress at that! We believed her completely until recently she let the cat off the bag! Our deepest secrets were like an evening joke for them!!So apparently without reading any blog column on parenting she succeeded in getting us to speak our day at school/college. She had a knack of reading our faces to know if it had been a bad day! So as she strings the flowers or kneads the dough, she will throw her questions to get her answers effortlessly! The next day will see her preaching a few lines to help us defend the difficult world we will go back to.. and that will be done so subtly that you cannot turn around and ask her why she said it!! Motherhood came very intuitively and naturally to her! Its becoming a mother myself that has grown to respect her ways immensely.

She has a passion for the Kolam/Rangoli(I have learned all mine from her!), making adapradhaman, singing, writing diary,play swing with her grand daughter, wearing chungudi sarees, buying mud pots with different roses from the nursery, lately the dough nuts have found a place too(not to forget her taste for coke and 7Up!..this is amusing for us though!) -what more… a passion for traveling too! Her grand daughters take her full mind these days. Now this is true and I now know it happens in many homes- they can do all that we were not allowed to do!!! They can sleep into the day, break cutlery at home that is 25 years old while we would have been asked to do thopi karanam even today(thats a exaggeration...just to convey some intensity :)), go out for shopping with her at 9 at night, can watch tv as long as they wanted, ask for pakodas at 12 midnight, play badi with neighbours without seeking permission,can over indulge in ice creams and can choose not to study!! How things change and after many arguments with her she once blurted out that, “ I never had the time with you’ll when you grew up and was always strict but now I feel I can make up for it! Don’t scold her..let her enjoy life!” Well? Well! I think I do get it in some parts! People, the rules of motherhood and grand motherhood are very different!

She taught me love, fun, care and dependency . My motherhood has taught me more of her and I have now grown to see all those little things she did to make me strong, spirited and vulnerable all at the same time! There is one thing that I certainly love and will always thank god for…the fact that my daughter has her most special relationship with her beloved grandmom and to me that is priceless as it brings back and preserves the sentiments completely all over again!!