Lakshmi C S
‘Mother, to suckle and suckle insatiably
The milk sentient from thy life breast’
—Subramania Bharati in Krishna – My Mother
Alamelu, my mother, is a small made woman. But from her childhood, heavy burdens were placed on her shoulders. They defined her, restricted her and made demands on her as a woman. But every now and then, Alamelu shrugged her frail shoulders and let the burden roll down her shoulders making place for some happy burdens she liked to carry, like educating her daughters and making her children live their life according to their desires and not according to what was expected of them. Whenever Alamelu shrugged her shoulders, she changed the order of things at home and created a new power balance. At this point in my life, it feels good to be writing about her, for she will turn ninety this year, on the fifteenth of March, 2005. She still stitches her blouses and petticoats in her old Singer sewing machine, discusses the nation’s politics with enthusiasm, eagerly watches some Tamil serials, and politely refuses to come over the phone when I call her at that time. She also has other ways of keeping us out when she so wishes. She wears hearing aids as she has become hard of hearing. Whenever we begin to tell her things that she does not agree with or does not like to hear, I watch her closely. She raises her hand gently and switches off her hearing aid! When I teased her about it once, she said she does it to save on battery! That is Alamelu in a nutshell – the woman who does what her heart tells her.
Songs on the Terrace and Cakes with Green and Pink Icing
Alamelu was born in 1915, the eldest in a family of ten children. She was sent to school and enjoyed her studies but could not continue after the seventh or eighth standard. She got married at eleven to a young man who was twenty. The story goes that my paternal grandmother was ill and told father to marry the girl selected by her for him. The girl selected was Alamelu, whose aunt had married father’s eldest brother. It seems father was not very happy with the choice and grumbled that he did not want to marry “that girl with motor-car eyes.” My mother has very large, beautiful eyes that do jut out of her face. Hence father’s comments. My grandmother did some emotional blackmail. She told my father she wanted to see him happily married before she died. Father complied. My grandmother lived for a long time after that. But I don’t think father regretted marrying the girl with “motor-car eyes.” She made a wonderful life partner when she came to his house at the age of fifteen after she came of age.
Alamelu was the eldest child in a large family where along with her own siblings, there were cousins and an elder aunt and a grandmother. Her father was a connoisseur of music, and Alamelu had been trained well in music. She had a resonant voice and could also play the veena. She often talks about nights on the terrace of her house when her father used to ask her to sing with her sisters. People in the neighbourhood waited for this informal concert, and sometimes there would be demands from the neighbours for a specific raga or a song. Her marital household was entirely different. Her mother-in-law was a widow who had single-handedly brought up her five sons and two daughters. She had tonsured her head when her husband died and held strong views about what a woman could and could not do. One thing she was definite about was that a decent woman could not sing and entertain her husband. Occasionally Alamelu played the veena in the night when she was with her husband, not because he knew anything about music but because he did not mind her playing. Her mother-in-law put an end to that because she used to sleep right outside their bedroom door and knew what was going on inside.
However, her mother-in-law was not exactly a cruel woman. Alamelu had long hair that came down to her waist, and her mother-in-law helped her wash her hair and also patiently taught her how to cook.
All the same, when they came to live in Chennai for a while, Alamelu did enjoy the freedom. It was not that they went out much. But Alamelu spent a lot of time playing the veena. She longed to go to music concerts that had become a regular affair in Chennai, but her husband was not too keen. She wrote about her life in a small journal that she has given me. In that, she says that there was a music hall nearby and that she stood in the verandah of her house to listen to the music concert going on nearby. Just like her childhood years, there was an old gentleman nearby who often came when she began to play the veena. Once when father returned from the office, mother was playing the veena, and father did not quite like it. He told her that he would not like her to play for others. So mother cut off the strings of her veena and did not play the veena for a long time. She began to play only when she started teaching my sister and me. But she was not one to mourn her lot and become inactive.
Father was a voracious reader; he taught her English, and she taught him Tamil, for he had studied in Malayalam medium. Popular Tamil magazines came home, and all the serials were bound and kept. As a child growing up in Mumbai, I remember mother taking my younger brother and me to a tailoring class run by a Parsi lady. I minded my younger brother while she took her lessons. Until I left home at the age of nineteen, I only wore clothes stitched by mother. Her enthusiasm to learn things never seemed to abate. Much later, when she was in her late fifties or so, mother joined a baking course. She wrote out the recipes in English which my father corrected after she came home. She came out with flying colours in that course. A little after that, I had gone home, and mother baked a cake for me secretly. She and father had come to the station to see me off. At the station, mother took the cake out of the box. It was a small round cake with green and pink icing and mother proudly gave it to me, saying, “Eat it in the train.” I heard father grumbling, “Is there anything left for me?” and mother reassured him that there was another one at home for him.
Food as Communication, Food as Adventure
That cake with green and pink icing was not the only adventure Alamelu had with food. Looking back, I feel that food was not just a preoccupation with women like Alamelu. There was a way in which she turned the food into a way of communication, assertion and adventure. For many years, I associated different seasons with different food items and intertwined with them were memories of procuring, preparation and consumption and the effect each one had on your stomach and physical system. The months preceding April were months meant for pickling, especially tender mango pickle and avakkai (big raw mangoes cut into big pieces and pickled in the Andhra style) and for making jackfruit jam and raw jackfruit chips. The entire process of cutting open the jackfruit and taking the fruit out with oil-smeared hands, slicing the fruit for jam, setting aside some for daily eating – dipping the fruit into honey and eating it was the most delicious way – and making raw fruit chips would permeate the entire house with the smell of smoking coconut oil and melting jaggery. The jackfruit jams would be used in the following months for puddings and snacks in which the jackfruit jam would be coated with rice dough and steamed, wrapped in a banana leaf.
With the summer holidays would begin a variety of duties for us. One of us would accompany mother to the main wholesale market to buy a basket of malgova mangoes, a special variety, and a basket of mangoes from Salem and half a basket of badami mangoes. No one ever refused to accompany mother, for the child who accompanied her always got to taste the mangoes the wholesale vendors offered. There was also the additional bonus ride back in a horse-drawn cart we called jutka, in Bangalore.
Mother would spend some time looking for a jutka with a healthy horse. She would tell the jutka driver that she would get down if he beat or poked the horse when she sat in it. The summer months were also months meant for making rice crispies called vadam to be preserved in huge tins for a whole year. The vadam-making activity would start early in the morning, and by eleven, mother would have pressed the cooked and steamed rice dough through various moulds onto a white veshti spread out in the backyard. Mother used to wear a hat to protect herself from the sun, and on a summer day, if she began looking for the hat, we knew what followed.
The monsoon and winter months meant sesame seed and peanut jaggery balls, besides all the festival eating in these months. We also knew what to expect in terms of food when we fell sick. The sick child got adequately pampered. Apart from herbal decoctions and various poultices, there were other ‘specials’ for the sick child. The silver bowl in which we ate till we began to eat off plates would be brought out. Two large servings of hot rice would be put in it. And a spoon of homemade ghee poured on it. And then, with the bottom of a thick, rounded spoon, the rice was mashed so that the child would not have to make any effort to chew it. The clear, top layer of rasam with pepper and cumin seed powder in it, just seasoned with mustard in pure ghee, was added and mixed with the rice. After this, a roasted pappad was placed next to the silver bowl. The silver bowl along with a spoon was (If I had written the silver bowl and a spoon the verb ‘were’ would be right. But when you say along with ‘was’ is right) brought to the child’s bedside and placed on the small wooden stool used to press rice noodles. (This was an all-purpose stool that we also used on the days we had oil baths, to sit on, waiting for mother to rub oil warmed with cumin seed, pepper and rice into our hair.) The fragrance of ghee and rasam would already have wafted to where the child lay, and with the gleaming silver bowl before it, no child could resist eating what was given. A child below ten may be told a story after that. A smaller child would drift into sleep listening to a soft lullaby sung in Raga Neelambari. Mother could bring magic to her resonant voice when in the mood.
I persuaded mother to write a journal a few years ago. The journal had several references to food. What she wrote had to do with producing food on the most difficult of occasions. Like in wartime when she walked up and down flights of stairs with heavy bags of wheat, to knock at the doors of some friendly Punjabi neighbours willing to give rice in exchange. Like the time she visited Hardwar in 1932, before all of us were born, when the whole family was stranded at the station waiting for a train delayed by several hours. Mother remembered seeing a woman in one of the huts nearby. She wandered around looking for her, found her and requested her to cook a lot of rice. Meanwhile, mother went and bought a huge basket, some leaves and earthen pots of curds for which Hardwar was famous at that time. She came back and the rice was ready. Mother requested the lady to crush on the stone some pungent chutney. She covered the basket with the leaves and put rice in it. She added the creamy curds and mixed it with the rice. She packed the chutney in a leaf-holder. She paid the lady for her trouble and carried the basket to the station. The family ate it relish, and everyone told her it was like nectar from heaven.
Our household was strictly vegetarian. Even garlic and onions were not used often. But mother would use a separate stove to make us eggs, and opposition was always quelled with the explanation that it was the doctor’s advice! Our Alsatian dog at home got its meat separately cooked in the garage. Its name was Lilly. It had strict orders not to enter the kitchen. Lilly would sit with its entire body in the kitchen keeping its hind legs and tail out, pretending that it was not in the kitchen. When I think about it now, I feel that women like my mother Alamelu were doing something similar. They were just pretending to comply with the rules of the family and the society but were quietly breaking them.
Mother eats only once a day these days, and at night she has a special gruel we call kanji. She prepares the gruel powder with all kinds of sprouted grains and adds cardamom and nutmeg to it for flavour. It tastes heavenly. She prepares an extra bottle for all of us but is yet to give us the recipe. Nor has she given me the recipe for rasam powder. I ask her for it often.
“What do you need it for? As long as I am alive I will make it for you” is her reply.
I once told her hesitantly, “But what will I do after your lifetime, Amma?”
“What is your elder sister there for?” she retorted.
Song and Dance Mornings and Evenings and Studies All the Time
Food was only one of the adventures mother led us into. Since she had not been able to pursue music in the manner she wanted she ensured that my sister and I were well trained in music. Had we shown an inclination to pursue it as a career, she may have stood by us. One major decision she took was to put me in a dance class at a time when not many girls from middle-class families were learning dance. It was more an upper-class trait. To those who asked her where was the need to bring dance into our family, she had the same classic excuse. She said the doctor had advised dance as an exercise since I was very skinny! She saw that I performed on stage and had a formal arangetram. I don’t know how she managed all this with just the salary of my father, an Accounts Officer. And where studies were concerned, the rule was that we had to do no housework as mother managed all that with the help of a cook and a maidservant. So our job was to study as much as we wanted for as long as we wanted. During exams, I would get up early at around 2 or 3 a.m. Mother would get up along with me so I won’t feel lonely. Sometimes she would ask me if I was hungry, and I always was. So she would go to the kitchen and make some hot dosai and bring it. I still remember my mother waiting for me at the Kalasipalayam bus stand in Bangalore late one evening. My graduation ceremony was in Mysore, and I took a bus from Mysore to Bangalore. I got off the bus and told my mother that I had got the gold medal in History and two cash prizes. She stood for a moment and looked at me, tears streaming down her face.
I had made up my mind that I would go to Chennai and do my M.A. at Madras Christian College. Father was not at all for it. He had already retired and was working in Kottayam, Kerala, in the Rubber Board He told me I could do my M.A. in Bangalore. But I wanted to spread my wings. My sister Rajeswari worked in a bank and gave me some money to apply to Madras Christian College. The letter came saying that I had got the admission. And here was father opposing it. He left the next day.
Mother came into my room and asked me, “Do you think going to Madras will make a difference in your life?”
“Yes,” I replied.
She left the room. She went to a bank and took a gold loan pledging her jewels. She went and bought a suitcase and four saris for me because I was now a post-graduate student and could not wear half-saris anymore. I still remember the colours of those Khatau voile saris – yellow, blue, pink and a very light purple with delicate floral prints. When my sister returned from the bank, we were all packed to go the next day.
“You never did this for me,” my sister complained.
“You did not ask for it,” mother replied.
Next day we took the night train to Chennai. We got down at the Central Station the next morning and then went to the Park Station to take the local train to Tambaram. I was sitting at the window looking out. As the train neared Tambaram, mother leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, “All Lakshmi’s dreams are going to come true.” It was a very poignant moment for me, and I have always kept it in my heart as a precious moment. Sometime back, when a book of mine was published, I recalled this moment and dedicated the book to Alamelu, my mother, an artist and dreamer. She was living with me for a while then. When she read it, she said, “Did I say that?” I wanted to tell her she had said that and much more. But the words got caught in my throat.
After that first trip out, she was with me when I decided to become a schoolteacher in a small town in Tamil Nadu. She was there to send me off to Delhi for my PhD. When I decided to remain single and much later decided to marry a person of my choice, she stood by me. Not that she agreed with many things I did, but she thought she should uphold my freedom to do what I wanted. And she has been that way always. Sometime back, I told her that SPARROW was having a financial crunch. She took out her chequebook and, from her pension money, wrote me a cheque for SPARROW for two thousand rupees.
Singing A Song for Subramaniam
I was not the only child Alamelu gave wings to. When my younger brother wanted to study further, she sold off all her silver vessels to put together some money. And when he decided to marry a Christian girl, mother went to the church, shook hands with the priest and later lived with him for ten years, bringing up his children. And when her heart gave her the reasons, she was willing to break any custom or rule doing that shoulder-shrugging act of hers.
My father, C.R. Subramaniam, died of thyroid cancer. Towards the end, he could not speak because they had removed his voice box. He wrote out what he wanted to say. He wrote a note to my mother urging her never to give up her music. Mother keeps that note in her spectacle box. When the hearse came to take his body to the cremation grounds, I decided that I would go with the body. I went and sat next to the body, and in a few minutes, much to the surprise of many people gathered there, mother was also sitting next to me. The priest tried to tell her that the shastras did not allow a woman to go to the cremation grounds. Mother wanted to know which shastras said that. “I have lived with him for more than fifty years and I have a right to see his body burn,” she said. After that, There was no high drama. (Shamee, what is meant is that my mother did not create any high drama while asking that question to the priest) Everything happened quietly. A few more women joined and we went to the cremation grounds. As my brother lit the pyre, she began to sing a song which father used to like. “Sivarama Krishna, Govinda Narahari Narayana Kasi Viswanatha…” rose her resonant voice with not a tremor. She completed the song, brought her palms together in a salute and turned away.
A year after my father’s death, I was in Chennai in connection with my research. I met a wonderful lady called Savitri Rajan, who had learnt veena from the famous Veenai Dhanammal. I wrote to mother about it. Mother wrote to me to ask her if she would teach her the thanam aspect of Carnatic music that she was never able to learn. Savitri Rajan graciously agreed to teach her. Mother came down and lived with me for three months and took lessons from her much to the amazement of the rest of the family. Every evening when I returned from my research, I used to find her practising. She mastered the thanam playing and only then left Chennai. After father’s death, she had taken to wearing the traditional nine-yard sari. It was hot in Chennai, and with her sensitive skin, she found it very difficult to manage with the heavy sari. I told her she should wear the regular six-yard one she always wore.
“I have entered this locality in a nine-yard sari. What will people say?” she said.
“Are you really going to bother about what these people say, Amma?” I said.
When I came back in the evening, she had put on one of my six-yard saris and since then has worn only soft cotton six-yard saris.
Alamelu is generous when it comes to gifts for her great-grandchildren. Even Khintu, the little girl growing up in my house, gets money and gifts when she visits my mother. I am always telling her stories about mother because I have so many things around me that she has used. There is the copper pot in which we used to store water that has her short name Alamu written in Tamil on the edge of the mouth. There is her veena carved in black wood presented by my grandfather. All the deep-frying pans she has bought ever since the birth of my elder brother for eight annas and twelve annas are lying in my little kitchen. There is also the rice noodle stool and the brass press that goes with it. I have removed the press and use it as a stool. In fact, a visitor from abroad looked at it and asked me hesitantly if it was a traditional toilet for children! With the stool also came the iron-pounder which mother had used to put pressure on the press. Wrapped in a newspaper, it lies behind my bedroom door, ready to be used if a thief ever dares to sneak into my house. All her other cooking vessels are also with me for she could not throw them away. People joke that all these are Alamelu’s bequest to me.
Last year or so, mother got tempted by the watch ads in the media. She told my brother that she needed a new watch. He told her that she really did not need it as she did not go out much and also her eyes were weak and she could no longer see the time. Mother went to the market quietly and got herself a Ritter watch. She showed it to me the other day. Occasionally when she goes out to the temple, she wears it. She asked me if I would like to have it. I told her I did not need it. But it is possible she may bequeath it to me along with all the cuttings she has made of home medicines, rangolis and recipes and various music notes. She knows I won’t throw them away. For her, they are not objects but memories she would like to keep for herself and for others to keep. All her things lying in various places in my little house spread her warmth around me. Often I stand by the kitchen window where I have placed the copper pot and run my fingers over her name etched on the pot. During those moments Alamelu seems eternal.
This essay was published in The Oldest Love Story: A Motherhood Anthology (Om Books International, Noida, 2022) edited by Rinki Roy Bhattacharya and Maithili Rao, a collection of essays that addresses motherhood through the prism of personal experiences. This work has been extracted with the permission of the author.
