A beautiful smile

Kamala Goburdhun née Sinha
15 October 1917 - 13 June 1990

If there is one thing Mama had in abundance, it was her propensity to smile and laugh wholeheartedly, a perfect counterpoint to my Papa who was predisposed to gravitas and who did not learn the art of laughing. Mama was one of those women who grew more beautiful with age, reaching the pinnacle of her beauty in her fifties!

The daughter of a freedom fighter who grew up in want and paucity; the eldest child of a woman who became her mother when still in her teens and whose art of parenting consisted in disciplining her eldest who then was left with the task of keeping the siblings in line; a girl who broke all rules to accede to the highest level of education even if it meant adopting her father's Gandhian ways to get what she wanted; a woman who refused to marry unless her country was liberated and worked and lived alone in the big city at a time when girls were married in their adolescence; a woman who fought for women's right when NGOs were not in fashion; a woman who fell in love with a portly gentleman and followed him across the world; a woman who only spoke Hindi to her child so that her child could speak her mother tongue effortlessly as she grew in different lands, a woman who learnt her husband's favourite language (French) as a birthday present to him; a small town girl who was to the manor born ; a mother who ensured that her child would never question her origins and love her country with passion; a woman who embraced life to its fullest refusing any treatment for the cancer that took her away as 'life was too precious to be wasted in induced slumber', Kamala Goburdhun née Sinha was an incredible woman who died with a smile on her lips.

Her refusal to bear a slave child resulted in my having a mother for just 39 years! And all through those years she never lost her smile, even when she sat in a car following an accident waiting for help. It did not matter if her sternum was broken and so were her ribs, she smiled so that her 6 year old child would not be frightened.

I am who I am because of what I learnt at her knee.

I miss her. I miss her smile. I miss her presence. I miss the bliss of still being a child.

I try my best to live to her expectations but know I will never be able to. I only hope that when we meet again I can look her in the eyes without hesitation and bask in the warmth of her smile

In the words of Pierre Lemaitre: Au revoir, là haut!( see you, up there)