I do not know my mother’s birthday. Does it sound familiar?
Those who have read the existential masterpiece of Albert Camus, The Stranger
my statement may sound like a direct take from it. There in the Stranger, the
protagonist named Meursault is confused about his mother’s death. Was it
yesterday or today? I do not have any such existential confusion about my
mother as she is still alive. But to tell you the truth, I do not remember my
mother’s birthday, I mean the date of birth. I am sure many of you must be like
me, not having any clue about the birthdays of your mothers. We generally think
about our parents as ancient animals that have been on the face of the earth since
time immemorial. They age and live on but nobody can calculate their origin.
These days, thanks to the kind of attention that a social networking site like
Facebook brings to one’s personal life, people tend to post their parents’
marriage anniversary pictures. Or the hip ones amongst our parents even post
their pictures of good times and claim that they have been together for a few
decades. For some it is a moment of celebration and for many others it must be
a lesson learnt, never to be repeated. I have not seen anybody posting their
mothers’ birthday pictures. Don’t mothers celebrate their birthdays? Don’t they
remember their own dates of birth?
Birthdays are
something that our mothers have lost along the way. They have forgotten the
fact that they had once taken birth on this earth. I have never seen my mother
talking about her birthday or even remembering her birthday and reminding us
about its importance. In my village, during my childhood birthdays were not an
important thing. Mothers remembered their children’s birthdays and they went to
the temple or other places of worship to pray for their kids. That was a sort
of minimum gesture and the maximum was expressed in making a sweet. Birthdays
were even postponed to the nearest weekend holidays as far as the working
mothers of the children were concerned so that they could make some sweet for
their children wholeheartedly. Mothers who always remember their children’s
birthdays often forget to remember their own. I have a strong feeling that they
replaced their own birthdays with those of their children. This sacrifice must
have made them really happy and worthy of their existence. Also I have seen
that in due course of time, mothers remember birthday of one of their children
better than the other kids of their own. Sadly, often the birthdays of the
girls are not remembered as much as those of the boys are remembered, mentioned
or even celebrated. In a patriarchal society girls are always seen as secondary
citizens. Mothers who perpetuate the same patriarchal ideas, in due course of
time, take forgetting of their own birthdays naturally and they do not feel much
of a problem in forgetting the birthdays of their daughters too.
(Mother and child, for illustration purpose only)
My mother never talks about her birthday. She also does not
talk much about my sister’s birthday. During my childhood, my birthday was
always mentioned, remembered and even celebrated by the weekend. Somehow I have
never seen my sister’s birthday being mentioned or celebrated. It is so
shameful that I do not remember my sister’s birthday even today. She is just
one and half years senior to me and strangely I do not remember her birthday. If I
really put some effort I can remember it but I invariably forget to greet her
on her birthday as that was not a practice during the childhood. Same is the
case with my mother. Hence, every year my mother spends her birthday like any
other day; she does not even come to know that it is her birthday. Isn’t it a
sort of injustice that someone does to oneself? Yes, it is. But then one has to
understand the priorities of their lives. The mothers of my mother’s time have
or had different priorities. Their focus was to bring up a family and pose
minimum questions. While focusing on the needs of others they defocused on
themselves. That’s why when they run to office or to the workplaces they
stopped heeding to the ways they were dressed up. A tear in the armpit and a
drop of tear in the eye made no difference to them though the former had caused
the latter. An unkempt bun of hair was mended while they ran to the bus stop or
to the railway station. Their breakfast was always eaten standing. They did not
drink their tea but gulped. But they never forgot to lock the door of their
homes and they never missed a hope. In this hectic life when did they have time
to dream about the presents that our fathers would have never brought for them
on their birthdays? Slowly they forgot their own birthdays. They became eternal
beings in our lives.
Once I probed about my mother’s date of birth. She could
have easily taken her school leaving certificate and showed me the exact date
of birth. But she did not do that. Instead she thought about it for a while and
said it was before India gained independence. She and the girls of those days
did not know much about the freedom struggle. But as they grew up they knew
about it and they thought about Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira
Gandhi. When Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead, my mother and other girls knew that
a great man was dead. They knew the worth of Gandhiji even if they were very
young to know what exactly Gandhiji had done for them. When Nehru passed away,
they were already in school and they thought Indira was their own elder sister.
They all hoped that Indira would bring about a change in their lives. Indira
Gandhi did bring certain changes in their lives. In the villages, educated
women came around to form Mahila Samajams (Women’s Clubs) that imparted
education to the illiterate women, vocational training, recreation and a sense
of unity amongst the village women. My mother, being a young high school
student was interested in all those things and she, her sisters and the girls
of their age started literally idolizing those women who led the Mahila Samajam
in the village.
(for illustration purpose only)
From the stories and anecdotes that my mother had told me
during the growing up years, I have gathered a few ideas about my mother’s
childhood. Born to a percussionist father and a ‘labouring’ mother, my mother
was the fourth among the six children who have survived out of the twelve
children my grandmother had given birth to. My grandfather was a well known
artisan in the village. But his mind was not in making things; his mind was in
music. He went to different South East Asian countries with a music troupe and
played a percussion instrument called ‘Takil’ or Tavil. When he was back in the
village, in his workshop, he sought help from his children. And often it was my
mother, being the middle one who got the responsibility to help him. Though my
mother learnt some artisanal techniques in her childhood, she never nurtured
any of those abilities. What I could see her doing in terms of artistic
expression was making small animal shapes out of jackfruit tree leaves or
making faces of clowns on the egg shells. But she and her siblings were in one
or the other way gifted artistically and none of them had the chance to develop
any of their fortes into a fulfilling profession or career. When my mother was
not helping her father in his workshop, she was holding her youngest brother at
her lap and moving around in the village with her playmates.
(for illustration only)
There was a thatched theatre nearby their home. It was at
the other end of a temple ground. As my grandfather was known to the cinema
theatre people, his children had free access to the theatre; they could go in
and come out at their will. My mother had watched most of her favourite movies
in that theatre. She learnt a lot of songs by heart from those experiences and
secretly admired the beauty of those screen heroines even when she knew that
she would ever become beautiful and famous like them. In the village there was
no high school. By the time she was in the primary school, her eldest sister had
become a teacher in one of the village schools. So she too followed her eldest
sister as a student in that school. After her primary education she was put to
the high school in the neighbouring village. A few girls only got the
chance to study in high schools. My grandparents were determined to educate all
their children. My mother passed her school final examination with good marks
and obtained admission to pursue her graduate studies at the famous Women’s
College in Trivandrum. I do not know what she used to be like when she was in
her school and in her college. But from some of the old family photographs, I
could reconstruct some vague sense of her life in those days, which I will
narrate in the following chapter.
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