Hearts and Sweaters

“Ma’am, your mother is so elegant, you must be really proud of her.” The words were uttered by one of my friends after I shared a decades old photograph of my young mother with her.

This made me look at the photo hard, very hard and it seemed that the photo is anything but still. It has a voice, a life in all that stillness. I looked closely at the photo and there it was all familiar smile and recognizable determined look that my mother carried. How calm her face looked, how steady the gaze, how erect the posture in the elegantly draped saree around her.  And as my friend suggested, should I be proud of my mother, I thought? Well, at the time my questioning mood is evoked, “Did my mother, while she was alive, ever asked this question to herself? Are people proud of me or am I proud of myself for being the person I have been?” I wonder if she ever did that?

I sighed, memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I do not wish to go along with that. The memories I value most, I do not ever see them fading and looked out the window, at the October sun. The monsoon has retreated and we are mid-way into October and the old photograph has inundated me with a flood of nostalgic emotions but at the same time a good photograph  never belongs to the past; every time one looks at it, it is alive and it is in the present moment, but the subject of picture is always more important than the picture and I summon into my mind that how when I was growing up in the north India during the month of October when air has that nip of winter and the woolens are not fully out, but one begins to wrap around a familiar shawl or a light sweater, my mother would take out from the trunk many pretty sweaters that she had painstakingly made for me and my brother and we became the proud models who invariably received floods of compliments for the sweaters that we wore! I still remember the proud look my mother had on her face when we looked dapper. For a woman who had spent most of her lifetime in a small sleepy town of north India, my mother knew about style. She had a classy taste for things. During those days there was no television, the newspaper and magazines used to be the only connection with the outside world, my mother raised us to love and embrace all the people of the world, tell us that people are beautiful; and we may grow up to be like stars in these magazines one day. She used to subscribe many magazines from around the country and even in that nondescript , lesser and uninspiring town of north India my mother, who would not settle for things ordinary, could get hold of imported second hand knitting magazines and laboriously understand and decode all the patterns of sweaters with western style designs and churn out one stylish sweater than the other, one trendy dress than the other for us to wear! She never let her disadvantages dampen her spirits. Everyone in that town and all the relatives would envy the dresses that we used to wear. I remember she was good at stitching, sewing and made such beautiful frock for me. I still remember one yellow one that I wore for a long time and the image yellow stayed with me and yellow is still one of my favourite colours.

The photograph and this month of October together and I am flashed back to the ‘Navratri’ how my mother used to celebrate , she would keep fast for nine days often only water she would consume the whole day but how we used to have variety of yummy fast recipes day after day. Orchestra shows and ‘Ramleelas’ were common and still I vaguely remember that during those days men used to play the role of  women and for many years one fair looking old man who did not even have teeth in his mouth used to play the role of  Sita! My young and impressionable mind used to be very confused at this sight and the ‘Sita’ that I imagined and saw in the pictures and heard in the stories was so different than the ‘Sita’ that was presented before me in that ‘Ramleela’. Invariably I would come home very disturbed after watching the ‘Ramleela’. I would tell my mother, “I don’t like Ramleela’. “Why” she would ask? I would say, “Because, I don’t like the look of Sita. Sita is so beautiful and the old man who plays Sita looks awful, He is more funny than beautiful.” So my mother would laugh at my reaction and would say, “Okay, do not go to watch Ramleela if you do not want to. Just read about everyone in your Amar Chitra Katha Comics.” As I grew up my protests became more dubious and cryptic, I would often mumble under my breath, “ But Maa, I don’t like Sita for one more reason, why did she have to depend on others to settle scores with Ravan? Why did she not destroy the evil herself like Maa Durga did?” And I still remember the shocked look that mother had on her face when she heard what I had to utter! I still do not know what she feared more, the reason that she did not have an answer to my question or that I was turning out to be too smart for a girl. “Shh Shh , how audacious and defiant you have become! I will put a stop to all these English comic books that you are reading! Go to the pooja room and say sorry to ‘Sita Maa’” my mother chided, and I would reluctantly go to our pooja room and say sorry to ‘Sita Maa’ and promise that I would be a good girl.

The noise of the TV in the adjacent room suddenly brings me back from my daydreaming, but even after decades, I have still not got the answer to the question that I had put before my mother. I know this for sure remembering my mother today, that the time perhaps balances out the good and the bad, the weak and the strong, the real and fantastical and the practical and the detrimental.

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss. Thus, even though at some juncture in our life, we become an entirely different person than what we started as with different dreams, different thoughts, different style, different life, but when we look at an old photograph, it creates a link, because memory is more indelible than even ink.