Grandma Tales: Nine

Grandma Tales: Nine

10 mins
1.4K


Story of the Eldest Son


I appreciate the kids, the brat pack as we elders call them, for this great idea. I could never imagine that these youngsters, not all that young now but still young compared to us, were so much attached to grandma. Grandma was my mother, and I am the eldest of her children. Now I am the eldest in the family as well!


I have known grandma for more years than anyone else in this family of ours, but I confess to knowing very little till I read all about her that was written by her grandchildren. Originally, this tribute to grandma was meant to be from the kids, her grandchildren alone, and we elders were not in it, so to say. However, to fill certain gaps and to make the awareness of grandma more holistic, we thought the sons, daughters and daughters-in-law and sons- in- law should also contribute. 

I remember my mother as a very serious person, not as someone who could tell exciting stories and crack jokes. My father, the grandpa, being the only son in his family, I am told that my arrival was greeted with great joy and celebrations. My father, it seems, broke some traditions to watch me being given birth to. Something which his mother did not approve of. I was born at home and the delivery was normal. My grandmother, despite what my mother is supposed to have said about her to her grandchildren, loved me and really cared for me. So did everyone else.


I remember spending much more time with my father than my mother. That was because, I now believe, my father wanted me to become a doctor like him. I find it strange how career plans of children are drawn up along with their horoscope at birth! My father took me quite seriously and began my education even as a child. I remember plugging his stethoscope into my ears and listening to heartbeats of my grandmother, grandfather, mother and virtually everyone around the home. Very soon, folks around me started calling me doctor. 


I am not very good at writing stuff, and, unlike the children, my memories of mother don’t flow automatically, the way they remember her and capture her essence so vividly. I wonder what defining features and traits my mother had, for I do not intend to produce a biographical narrative of her here.

I think my mother prepared us for life, rather than grew us up as her offspring. Normally, you have mothers doting excessively on them, considering them as some prized possession, guarding them and keeping tabs on them constantly. I do not remember my mother doing all that.


The one thing mother loved me for was my features. Everyone said I looked like dad, that I had a similar nose and eyes. And I think she loved me most for carrying his features, though it was quite later that I discovered the real reason. 


“You share so much with your father.” She said one day. “You have his nose and eyes, maybe his intelligence too, and it seems you share his ambitions as well. You are already being called doctor, and one day, I am sure you will become one.”

“No mother, I may look like my father but I think like you.” I must have said this to please her, thinking that she felt bad that I had nothing common with her. She laughed at me and kissed me.


“You know, you may not understand it, but I am really happy you look like your father. Everyone is happy, you know. It is a tradition in India to connect a child to the family with the features he or she has. I guess it all started with suspicion. Men are so suspicious about their women, more if the women are beautiful. Women give birth to a child, so no further confirmation of maternity is required. Men just help in making a child, so it becomes important for them to know that the child has been made by him. So you see, children are always subjected to the scrutiny of parentage. If you did not look like your father in any way, people would have this nagging doubt about me. You saved me of that trouble.”


It all went over my head at that time but must have made an impact on me for I recall this memory quite clearly. As I told you, my mother loved us all, but I have never seen her doting on us. I recall becoming irritated many times when she made me do things which I could not have done in my age. Yet she would not help, insisting that I try again and complete the task on my own. She would also not allow me to get it done by someone else. My father used to scold her for doing that, even tell her that she was insensitive to children, but she would say that children must grow up to stand on their feet. 


When the other children came in, this training helped me, for I had learnt to do things without depending on anyone. I guess I grew up with the important learning that my mother gave me, the less you depend, the more you learn and easier life could become. Such learning from your parents does not come packaged in books or tutorials; it just rubs in and becomes part of you. A child imitates parents in a thousand different ways and outgrows the phase quickly. Learnings at home are never conscious. 


I have never seen my mother falling ill. By falling ill, I don’t mean she never had flu or fever, but I have never seen her lying on the bed, unable to move or do her chores due to illness. She ate well, but little. She slept for fewer hours than us, but fitfully. And, believe it or not, she believed in exercise. Well now, considering those times and the women of those times, I can hardly recall any other mother doing exercises other than homework. But my mother made it a point every day to wake up and walk in the garden and stretch herself and even run around a bit. My father was not the jogging type.


I have never seen her fat and flabby. In my impartial estimation, my mother looked grand and devastating when she was young, grander than most of my friend’s moms or relatives of mine. I guess a lot many women were jealous about her beauty. My dad never bothered to keep pace with her fitness, though he was not that fat.


I don’t think the word conservative applied to mother. She allowed us to do things which other parents were critical about. She would let us indulge in dangerous sports, and when my father scolded us she would say “what will happen? We have a doctor don’t we?”


One funny thing I remember about my father was his nagging habit of following my mother around the house with a newspaper. He read papers end to end, and he made it a point to share interesting stories with my mother who could otherwise not read. The news was always political, and my mother, I think, deliberately ran around the house on some pretext or the other just to avoid him. The height of this was that my mother sometimes escaped into the bathroom to keep father away, and there he would stand, outside the door, talking and reading aloud!


After several failed efforts, my mother just gave up and would argue on politics with him, choosing an argument which opposed his beliefs and views. After some time, it was my father who began evading my mother, in an effort to avoid getting into an argument with her. For wherever reasons these arguments began, they would soon turn personal. At times it would turn unpleasant and irksome for us and one of us would get in between the warring parents and remind them they were disturbing us.


My Father also made it a habit to discuss medical science with mother. He would describe patients who came to him and their symptoms and ask mother for solutions. I think she enjoyed these moments. You have already read about how unorthodox my father was in treating patients.


There was this instance which comes to my mind. A young lady patient was once brought to him by her husband for problems that suggested no cure. They had subjected the lady to all kinds of treatment; homoeopathy, Unani and Ayurvedic, besides the regular allopathic treatment. It transpired she was afflicted with some psychosomatic disease which in turn was the result of juvenile diabetes. Her medical history suggested that she had fits of delirium when she went after her mother in law and father in law with venom and vengeance. During these episodes, she needed to be contained to bed by force and was tied to it. She had not responded to treatments favourably. Her in-laws thought that she was possessed by demonic forces that made her do things that she did and took her to a witch doctor. Nothing happened by way of improvement.


The case was referred to my father by another doctor, with the recommendation that my father’s treatments were different from other doctors. My father studied the papers, examined the girl and told my mother that it was not his kind of case. My mother asked my father why she was violent only with her in-laws. Father explained that the human mind worked in many mysterious ways. Being a prisoner of logic and reason, it searches for a subject or an object to latch on to, to be able to explain the logic of its action. He then told mom about a friend of his who thought that a particular shirt he wore brought him luck. He, therefore, made it a point to wear the same shirt on all events of importance. The shirt was worn out, yet he could not help throwing it away, for he would then have to give up his belief in the shirt. Most of us believe in God because we do not have explanations for a lot many things. Whatever therefore is unexplained must be the doing of God.


The patient was born with diabetes, a condition that was discovered only during her first pregnancy. Her nervous system, therefore, could have been considerably weakened. In most Indian households, the in-laws have been seen to have contributed to their daughter- in -law’s mental condition by sheer insensitive behaviour. In this case, the girl, already diseased since birth, latched on to the two figures to ascribe all her woes and when her mind was freed from controls during the fits, she went after them as they were the main players in her mind. 


My mother asked my father whether it would help the girl if she were to be kept away from her? She reasoned that if the mind was given a chance to divert itself from these persons, maybe it could turn itself to giving the girl a chance to heal. She thought that the girl was perhaps being blamed for being sick resulting in a loss of faith and confidence in herself. To cut the story short, my father was impressed and passed on the advice to the husband. A year later, the husband came to my dad and thanked him for the suggestion. His wife has improved considerably and was now mentally fit to fight her ailment which unfortunately had no cure. However, with the help of doctors, diabetes was brought under control.


There was nothing great in my mother’s suggestion, and that, she said, was the beauty. She used to tell me often that we human beings look for miracles to happen when we are in trouble. This search for extraordinary happenings distracts us from the simple and practical solutions we can always try. She pointed out that thousands of homegrown solutions and remedies have been developed without any apparent scientific education by people sitting at home. These remedies were more based on common sense and practical intelligence. She regretted that as education took its stranglehold on people, they were becoming more and more reliant on specialists to resolve any and all problems, abandoning faith in them and the solutions available free of cost at home.


I guess these are not the type of stories our children have been telling you. But coming to think of it now, I realize that my mother was a much greater woman that I thought her to be. I do confess that I was biased in my dealings with her, and considered her inferior for lack of education. But now, though late, I believe that lack of education did not take away anything from my mother. She had intelligence in abundance and used it to her advantage and to our advantage in so many subtle ways. I think my father had seen and appreciated this aspect of mother, for I have never seen him complain about her at any given point in time.


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