MOTHER’S DAY…AND MONTH…AND YEAR EVER AFTER

My maa is the unsentimental type,
She's not moved by any Mother’s Day hype.

(She’s not a person who cuddled and snuggled or read bedtime stories to us. But she always managed to cook our favourite dishes, and sew new outfits and knit new sweaters into which we could snuggle up, anyway. She’s still busy-fingered, clack-clacketing knitting needles and trailing strands of wool, knitting for her four granddaughters.)

Her knees give her trouble, her back gives her pain,
Yet when I need a helping hand, she’ll visit again.

(When my elder daughter was born, I stayed with her for three months. She would get up at dawn, cook all kinds of food supposedly good for lactating mothers, go to work, come back late after shopping for 1001 baby-stuff, AND, after all this, would stay up half the night singing lullabies to the baby, just so that I could sleep a little.
She stayed with me for five months after my younger daughter was born, and helped me just as much as before, if not more.)

She never uses make-up, her hair’s almost white,
Yet she’s fun and sporting, and a FRIEND all right.

(My brother and I never really had any generation-gap issues with her. She’s such a calm person, that we spontaneously and naturally shared all our adolescent indiscretions with her. She let go so confidently, never panicking, hardly-ever scolding. We came running back to her with our confidences. Now that the decades have ironed out the adult-child barriers, there is an ease, a comfort, a warmth, a PEACE, whenever she visits.)

You may think she’s boring, a plain-dull house-wife,
Yet she travels a lot and experiments with life.

(When we were young, she would read up, write-down and cook-up new recipes from newspapers and magazines. The whole family loved her kitchen-surprises. She would collect knitting-patterns and embroidery-designs and she also learnt dress-making. My childhood wardrobe was full of maa-made garments. All this while looking after a family of six almost single-handedly.
Now that we are all grown-up, she and her girlie-gang of sisters and cousins often take off together, traveling to various parts of India, usually to places with a religious connect. And from all accounts, the entire group of giggly sixty-pluses have a blast together.)


She never reads my blogs, though she’s hooked to Microsoft solitaire,
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, Maa, and week and month and year.

(Thanks for being strong as a rock, comforting as a cushion. I wish you were here.)