Author: Arpita Dutta, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
You may consider it as a fiction. It is about someone’s mother. A mother, who can be mine, yours, and anyone’s as far as the emotion associated with the term Mother is concerned. As during our research training, we have been advised to narrow down the topic, I am giving this mother a geographical identity: She is from Mumbai. You can in fact find such mothers from Kannur to Kunoor, from Kaziranga to Kachchh, and from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Her name is Anandi Borkar. Individual identity demands a bit of physical description. Anandi aai (Mother) is around seventy years old. She is neither tall nor short. We don’t know the length of her hair as we have always seen her in a bun that looks like a bird’s nest. Her skin tone is similar to those people who often lay bare at various sea beaches.
Why am I talking about Anandi aai? Is she a politician? An actress? A cricketer? At least a frequent visitor of night parties which has earned her permanent presence on page 3? The answer could lead to you to sheer disappointment. She possesses none of the above-mentioned socially accepted prestigious qualities. And yet, I will say that she has to lead an exemplary life. It is this aspect of her life that I am trying to share with you in the following few words which can often appear as blabbering and to some extent, incoherent.
Anandi aai was the fifth daughter among the eleven children of Suchitra and Hemant Borkar. She has to lead a very simple childhood where household work got utmost importance although it doesn’t mean that she didn’t get any formal education. What I mean to say is when we compare her eagerness to excel in her studies by her own to today’s tendency to admit our children to private tutorial centres, her tenacity and dedication demand salute not only from her teachers and classmates but also from today’s career savvy generation. Anandi aai has taught chemistry in a college for 35 years.
Anandi aai is married to Peter Jose, a Chemistry teacher originally from Kerala but settled in Mumbai. The name has the ability to indicate our religion apart from our gender though not always. In our Anandi Mai’s story, she is Hindu and her husband is Christian. Shakespeare should have thought about this aspect of the name before uttering his famous statement on the name. At the time when they got married, our society was far away from flexibility as far as accepting interfaith marriage is concerned. It is still a surprise for me that being born and brought up in a conservative Hindu family, where from did she gather the courage to say “Yes” to Peter’s three worded quintessential sentence written on the back page of an organic chemistry question paper of their M.Sc. final semester exam? Anandi aai didn’t give in to her family’s verdict when she was told that this marriage would lead to the end of all her ties with her paternal and maternal families. Rather she went ahead and left her home. No one stood beside her although she knew that she was a topic of discussion in everyone’s hush-hush. Even the walls and pillars of her paternal house had their whispering conversation. She started her married life with Peter in his abode. Logically, Anandi aai should have received a new identity by becoming Anandi Jose but she didn’t or rather she didn’t accept that norm of identity. Thus Anandi aai, despite being married to a Christian remained Anandi Borkar throughout her life and both she and her husband followed their religion without any tug of war between them.
I could have ended my realistic fiction here itself as in a society where theoretically we consider unity in diversity as our motto although in reality, often it takes a twisted form to appear as uniformity is unity, our Anandi aai became a symbol of revolution. But I think I need to narrate two more incidents of her life which would define the expression Exemplary in its fullest form. Anandi aai and Peter had two children: Sara and Manish. Both of them were the apple of the eye. They too were inclined towards studies like their parents and as an obvious consequence, they became assistant professors over the course of time. The family was a happy one though I confess, not very rich financially because reality indicates that the noble profession ends up with an ignoble amount of monthly income. But, as I have heard somewhere that those who don’t follow the route followed by everyone (please don’t confuse it with the iconic poem of Robert Frost) face uncertainty in their life, Anandi aai and Peter too had to confront the same.
Sara, an assistant professor of Biology, God knows how, met with an accident on a footpath while coming back from her college. She didn’t flout the traffic rule for which uniformed people could blame her for the sudden end of her life. It was, on the contrary, a dead black Mercedes of a speed lover young man which gave a “slight push” to Sara from behind while meditating in its zigzag adventure on the road and footpath. Anandi aai didn’t weep, Peter became silent, and Manish engaged himself in academics as much as possible to heal. Apart from teaching, Anandi aai started a free school at home to teach the basics to underprivileged women: perhaps it was her way to fight the sorrows of her life.
Time went on… Days passed, months moved forward from January to December, and calendars changed their versions from old to new. Anandi aai for quite a few months was feeling uneasy after having her food. Nothing unusual in fact. We the degreeless doctors by our right often treat such uneasiness with antacids and various versions of soda water. Anandi aai too was not an exception in this context. But what about the fever that she was suppressing by taking P-650 at a stretch? I have to say here that our mothers have a birth right which has allowed them to hide their illness till the last moment so that the family doesn’t suffer. Anandi aai suffered to teach her students who were her extended family members and to take care of Peter and Manish. Nobody would have known her pain if Manish didn’t discover it on the day when he saw her vomiting at night, that too secretly. If we had been a little more careful, we could have noticed much earlier that she was becoming pale and weak but as I have said, mothers have a God-gifted ability to perform an act of camouflage. The frequent journey to the hospital commenced. Her pathological report indicated that she was in her last stage of life as cancer had signed an agreement of permanent settlement with her body. She didn’t shed tears, she didn’t become mentally depressed, and she even didn’t stop teaching at home when she came back from the hospital. Her son and her husband remained her pillars of strength. 18 surgeries, multiple stents and uncountable numbers of blood tests, blood transfusions with gradually increased frequency: Nothing could stop her from love for her family: the close and the extended one. When she left for the new world, the smile and determination on her face were still there. We didn’t take her to the crematorium. Graveyard too was not her destination. Her final wish was to be within the student community. Hence she donated her body. Who knows, maybe we will be able to know in future the secret of her mental strength after in-depth research conducted by medical students on her body. The exemplary life of Anandi aai, the so-called ordinary yet extraordinary woman remained immortal: not by donating her life but by remaining in our mothers: our amma, maa, aai, ammi…
About the Author:
Ms Arpita Dutta is an Independent Researcher of cultural studies and Indian literature in English. She has pursued her M.A. in Political Science from IGNOU. She is an independent teacher of French and Political Science. She writes Fiction in Bengali for various magazines and translates Fiction into Bengali and English from Hindi, French and English. She has presented papers at various international and national Conferences. Her research articles have been published in journals. Her areas of interest include global politics, cultural studies, comparative literature, migration studies, and identity literature.
