Friday 13 June 2014

A letter to mom

Dear Mom,

Every year on this day I count the number of years I have had to live without you. Twenty four this year. It has been too long and I do not know how many more I will be able to go through holding on to memories that are slowly fading and need to be jolted back to life. Your smile greets me every morning as I walk through the door of the house you built with so much love and strife and I try hard to remember the sound of your laugh and the lilt of your voice that never rose in anger during the 38 short years we lived in symbiosis. Every year on your birthday or death anniversary I feel the need to speak with you and be heard so the way I have found is to write a blog - oh what a blogger you would have been - and share with  it friends. For the past few days the issue of motherhood as been up most on my mind and I felt the need to try and talk about our relationship.

I needed a picture for this post and the reason I chose this one is because I realised that you had but me on a pedestal since the moment I took my first breath on this earth. Come to think of it, you did it well before: on that fateful day when you decided not to marry before Independence because you wanted your child to be born free! This was so important to you that you were even willing to sacrifice your chance to be a mother. I cannot begin to imagine how blessed I am that you become a mother as you were an exceptional one. The question that will remain unanswered is whether I met your expectations.

When I look back at what I have achieved, I realise I still have a long way to go.

Ma you broke all rules and traditions in many ways and everyone has been a lesson to emulate, however imperfectly.

I know how you cherished the notion of a free India and today I would like to talk about just that. I am glad in a way that you are not here to see how little if at all, we respected the freedom the likes of you gave us. True none of you made the ultimate sacrifice but I know the suffering you went through. Today rather than holding our heads high, we who still believe in India, have far too often had to hang our heads in shame. The beautiful land you left us has been raped in every which way possible. It is almost as if we 'free' Indians had to fall for the seven cardinal sins! You name it and we did it all. The party you all belonged to and which was made of like minded passionate people united by a single cause who were all willing to bear blows without flinching, to refuse food and drink for days and weeks at an end, to wear clothes that chaffed your skin and to sleep hungry rather than ask anyone,  has sunk so low that even I had to renounce it though I know you too would have done so. From a free and fair party it mutated into a dynasty whose slaves we became unwittingly. India was far from being free. 

Even today after 67 years of freedom children sleep hungry and 5000 of them die everyday. Millions of them do not go to school. Women are raped and killed in the name of misplaced honour, caste, or simply lust and everyone who could do something is in a catatonic state. You would be shocked to learn that greed has reached such a state that predators even feed on children as every programme aimed at benefiting the poor is hijacked to feed bottomless pockets. You cannot walk safely on the streets if you are a woman. Actually you are even killed in the womb if you are a girl. There are so many things that one is helplessly ashamed of and yes I say it again we are not free. 

I have tried to do my bit but it is such a tiny drop in this huge ocean, but being your child I know I will soldier on till my last breath.

Recently there were elections and we seem to have been able to break away from the stranglehold of the self chosen few. We now have a Prime Minister who was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth but has risen from the ranks as one would say. He may belong to a party that I never warmed up to earlier but from the time he got elected he has spoken a language you and I vibe with. In one of his speeches he said that people like me, born in free India had not had the privilege to 'die' for our country but we were given the unique chance to live for it. These words touched my heart as a precondition to my birth was a free India.

Today, the day you moved on many moons ago, I want to truly live for India and redeem a debt I owe you. Unless I do this, I cannot face my maker and more than that, face you who placed me on a pedestal before I was even a thought.

your daughter

anou

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