Today is my Ma’s first death anniversary. She left us last year, at the beginning of her 93rd year.
Since yesterday, memories of her have been coming back—not as one coherent story, but as fragments of a life. Faces, places, gestures, little acts of love. And somewhere between those memories, I have been trying to understand what my Ma really meant to me.
She was born in Kolkata in 1933. The fifth child and third daughter in a conservative Bengali family, she never went to school. In those days, boys went to school; girls stayed at home and were educated within the family. Perhaps that is why it is strangely ironic that she became one of the greatest teachers of my life. She was nicknamed ‘Chaini’—’unwanted’. Yet the small girl who was given that name grew up to be sharp, intuitive, positive and remarkably resilient. She inherited her father’s deep faith and took naturally to religious rituals.
At nineteen, she was married to my father, thirteen years her senior, and left Kolkata for a distant Delhi—trustingly holding the hand of a man who was, in many ways, still a stranger to her. And then she did what she seemed to do throughout her life. She adapted. She learnt a new language, a new city, new customs, new people and a completely different social environment. And over the next six decades, she built a home and a family there. For my father, for my brother and me, for all of us.
Ma had an extraordinary ‘can do’ spirit. Problems were meant to be dealt with, not worried about. Her positivity was infectious. Looking back, I realise how much of that quality I have inherited from her. She was our protective umbrella. And I remember the small things beneath that umbrella. The fresh orange juice she would get for me every afternoon from the neighbourhood juice shop. Her familiar assurance—“All will be well”—whenever I was feeling low or disheartened. Her cooking my favourite dishes when I returned home from the hostel. The countless little acts of care which, at the time, seemed so ordinary that I never stopped to think that they were, in fact, expressions of an extraordinary love.
Memories have a strange way of returning when someone is no longer there. And with them comes a painful realisation. I provided for her needs and comforts as she grew older. But did I give her enough of myself? Enough time, enough companionship? Enough of the simple presence that a mother perhaps seeks from her son as the years advance? I don’t think I did. Life became busy. Work, responsibilities, my own family, the endless hurry of everyday existence. And somewhere in that hurry, I perhaps forgot that while I was moving forward with my life, my mother’s world had gradually become smaller. Yet, even then, she never complained. Even till her last days, whenever I asked her how she was feeling, her instinct was to reassure me. As if even at the end, she did not want to burden her son with her troubles.
That was Ma. The umbrella remained open. Till the very end. There was one ritual that stayed with us almost till her last day. In the evening, when I went to sit with her for a while, she would blow her conch shell. That sound has stayed somewhere deep inside me.
Today, a year after she left, I sometimes imagine that she has finally met Bapi, my father, again. Thirty-two years after his departure. I imagine the two of them sitting together somewhere, having a cup of tea after such a long separation. And perhaps, every now and then, looking down at me. I don’t know whether there is such a place. But I like to believe there is. Because some bonds are perhaps not broken by death they simply become invisible.
My Ma came into this world as a little girl called ‘unwanted’. She left it having spent ninety-two years giving love, strength and blessings to everyone around her. And perhaps that is the deepest irony of her life.
Today, I don’t mourn only the mother I lost. I would like to celebrate the woman she was. And I remain deeply conscious of the greatest blessing she left me— a lifetime spent under an umbrella of unconditional love. Ma, the umbrella may no longer be visible. But I still feel its shade. And I always will. ❤️
In musing……. Shakti Ghosal
A New Beginning 