The Whole in a Drop – Sweet, Sour and Beyond - 1
My Mother Janaki Mani
Janaki Mani plodded her way through the day. That is what
she did with her life. Same she did with her talents, her youth, her marriage,
her middle age, her children, her relationships and with every thing about her.
Plod. That term hits her like muddy, sodden sock. I mean, it fits her well. Did
she have emotions ? She had done her share of crying. She has had
her excitements. But her stoicism got the better of her soon and she continued
to plod her way. She used to be under the tongue lashings of her dynamic
mother-in-law, when that grand old lady was moving about like a tigress on the
prowl.(It is another story about her, a separate chapter or even a book, cannot
do justice to her) But since she became a disabled tigress, Janaki had to move on her own accord and that new
freedom seemed too late. A sighted person whose eyes have almost atrophied by blindfolds
suddenly open to lights. She plodded her way in this comparative freedom. Her
body had aged during the course of these plodding and her mind too tired.
But she is made of iron. She knew that in the
back of her mind. That reflected sometimes in her stubbornness. An asinine stubbornness, sometimes. She may look anemic. She may be slightly bent.
But she won’t break, that is for sure. She is in fact the silent prop to her
stronger looking husband. She is a sure example to the saying : behind whatever success a man has achieved there stands a woman.
She succoured him during his emotional weaker moments. Did he
drain her? Well, he might have, at times. But the very fact of her having to
recharge his energies, and that too, unobtrusively, silently, made her strength
stronger.
Is it not a fact that you can climb a mountain
better and faster when you have to help somebody dependant on you ?
Her husband had his highs and lows, but
everything was even for her. It was not a flat flatness. She didn’t resent it.
Her very nature cannot resent anything or anybody.
What excites her most ? Children ? Relatives ? Music ? Books ? All these had excited
her to some extent. But nothing had been of titanic proportions. But even those
little excitements are no more for her. She has seen them all.
God ? Does God excite her? Yes, a bit. But not the God of her
husband or that of her monastic children. God is for her a quiet surety. A surety within her.
For her husband God has lately become a
passionate affair. A passion in which his “I” was very much there. For her
monastic children God is a passion that has been sometimes loud and some times
flashy and finally taken the colour of
monastic ochre.
She had been the quiet deep well from which they
had sprung colourfully.
She, now at 73, plodded her way, in a way alone.
The pin prick of a still garrulous mother-in-law itched her. Her body, which neither laboured hard as her mother-in-law’s had done nor did
systemic exercises, now plodded along with her but not with as much willingness
as herself. It refused to get up and cook up something interesting and sustain
itself but satisfied itself with simple minimum sustenance.
Her
mind plodded along, on a day-to-day basis, not taking recourse to nourishing
foods such as music or books but spreading along only as much as the day-to-day
affairs of the growing family required.
But it knew of its strength deep down.
Janaki is Sita. Sita is
not flashy. Sita is
strength. Sita is
not fully recognized even by her children and grand children. Sita herself didn’t know or perhaps did not let
others know that she knew that Ramayana is really Sitayam Charitam Mahat. That, doings of Sri Rama is really the great history of Sita. Jai Siaram ! Victory unto Sita Ramachandra !
Written sometime in 2008
