Memory and Mother ------------------------ One morning I asked my mother the meaning of the English word, ýLife.ý She told me it meant ýJindagi.ý Thatýs how I understood what she meant when the night before when she had cried in utmost hopelessness- hey bhagwan, are we never to have any happiness in life? She stopped pounding on the clothes that she was washing and asked me why I wanted to know. I said ý tesai. She could not hide her relief not to have to explain the grim realities. But I could tell that she knew that I was aware of everything. My earliest memory is of the time when Sir locked me up in the bathroom because I had accepted a rupee note from one of his friends who had come to visit. He was there when his friend handed me the bill to ýbuy chocolates,ý but he waited for his friends to leave before handing me the punishment for bad manners. The time I spent locked inside may have been an eternity. The loneliness and guilt welled up my eyes and as I looked in the mirror, hot teardrops fell down my cheeks. Like Mother I had learned from early age to cry quietly, silently so that only I could hear the bawling noisy sorrows that erupted inside me. Mother used to say that he was a saint when not drunk. The only time she was happy was when he was away. He traveled frequently for his job. There were two times when he went away for extended periods- two years in England and two in Delhi. He wrote all these letters about how he had quit drinking. But when he returned he was not a saint. Mother and I we called him ýSir.ý Right after she was married to him, they lived in a government quarters of his work where the peons called him ýSirý so in jest she had picked it up. And I learned from her. When he was in England he wrote to her. He addressed her: My Nuisance. I have her diary where she copied her letters to him. She began her letters- Dear Sir. And ended them ý Your Nuisance. Mother had this fascination with arts, music and literature and knowledge. She never threw away old books. I had my books from kindergarten for a long time. She was a teacher of English for a long time and later worked as a librarian. She would come behind me while I was reading my lessons and would be amazed to find out that a certain flower was called ýChrysanthemumý in English. She helped me pronounce it and said, ýEven I did not know that.ý She taught me never to disrespect books- ýnever soil or tear the books,ý she said. She would put a cassette on the tape recorded and just record whatever I said in my child-speak. Most of those tapes were lost and I never got to listen to them when I grew older. There was one surviving tape: I hear myself describing how I would grow up to be a night-bus driver. Mother breaks into her innocent laughter and then Sir scolds me in his drunken garble that I should be an engineer like himself not the lowly driver. And he shouts at her ýYouýve ruined him.ý I burned the tape in rage. I do miss the sound of her laughter. I have never been able to sleep. When young I pretended to fall asleep as soon as I heard the door slam and he returned home at night. I closed my eyes as hard as I could but I really did not was to fall asleep. My childish sense of responsibility would not let me leave Mother alone lest he harm her. I fantasized about growing big, tall and strong like Tipu Sultan and fight Sir if he laid his hands on her. I heard the shouting, his drunken demand for sex in the filthiest words, her sobbing and sometimes him hitting her. I did not have to be asleep for nightmares. She tried to hide it from family and friends but he was a shameless one-man road show. One morning some of Motherýs friends came to ask her to join them to a visit to a temple. She lied that she had much things to do. But the blue spot above her eyes was screaming the truth. When I was older, about 8 or 10 years, she would send me to the neighbors to call for help when he was uncontrollable. They came and their children, my friends tagged along with them, to watch the spectacle. Sir once went to Motherýs office and fought with the security guard who did not let him in as he was too drunk. The whole office must have found out about it. I wonder how she faced her co-workers, how humiliating and degrading it must have been. During monsoon he would come home late at night, his clothes filthy with mud and slime. One afternoon from the window of my class in school I saw him slumber inside the school gate, with his soiled, muddy pants and jackets, on drunken, unsure foot going into the business office. I was on my seventh grade. If it had been the lunch or break times the whole school would have seen him that way. I just wished he were dead right then as I had done many times before. Mother tried every remedy. In her hopelessness she was went to a dhami/jhakri who gave her a bottle of alcohol that he said was ýprayed uponý which should really help Sir. Sir did drink that and got merry-drunk. My family held pujas and saptahas on his name to cure him with divine intervention. Mother sometimes sang to me and my sister before bed. In the dark her low voice rang peacefully. She did not sing lullabies but songs from old Hindi movies. Her favorite one was: aage bhi jane na tu, pichhe bhi jane na tu, job hi haiý, bas yehi paal haiý Sir had gone to Russia for his engineering right after his ISc. That was where he found Vodka. He never went back to Russia in the eighteen years since he returned. We had stacks of engineering books in Russian and numerous slides of his projects and travels. One night as he fell to an inebriated stupor, he blubbered something about a Russian woman named Oxana. That was the one and only time he mentioned that. Mother was in the kitchen so I donýt think that she heard. But the next day I ransacked through all his papers and books. I squinted at all the slides for a hint. No mention of any woman. There was one slide of a group of students. He was standing in the side with a shy smile, his head then full of hair. There were some girls on the picture but he looked too young, too shy, too out of place to have had a relationship with any of them. But I never trusted him so I never found out. (.....contd)