To my aunt, with nostalgia

A couple of days ago I was explaining a moving story in my son's Hindi literature textbook to him. It was about a lonely middle-aged woman who has lost her son and has been rejected by her husband and who desperately wants to belong to society.

So she goes uninvited to community weddings, works like a horse, kneading dough, rolling out bread and advising people on customs and traditions and waits for people to actually invite her formally. But no one does and that breaks her heart.

That story brought back memories of my own widowed, childless aunt who all of us thoroughly disliked then. Not so long ago, joint families in India always supported many such unfortunate women who weren't allowed to work or live independently and survived on the fringes of a huge bustling joint clan, making their own silent contribution to the running of the household.

My aunt would visit us during the long summer vacations when my mother really needed extra help to tame a lot of six unruly children.

Sometimes she would make other unscheduled visits as well during Diwali or Holi and we thought that was really unfair of her when we had just begun to breathe easy after she had left us in the summers.

Plucked chickens

She would take charge of the toughest jobs at home as herding us girls, rubbing all sorts of oils and condiments in our hair, then pulling them uncomfortably into long plaited coils.

That done, she would proceed to scrub us down with chick-pea paste that was meant to smoothen our skin but it made us feel like a pair of plucked chickens. We hated that routine, but were too terrified to utter a word.

Anything that was a drudgery at home or was tedious or challenging was what my aunt absolutely loved. She would simply tie the ends of her white sari around her waist and with a determined sour look simply take a plunge into that chore.

Washing heavy linen, rolling out the poppadums to dry them out in the sun later, making pickles and jams, pounding the dry whole spices for the year, running to the wholesale market to buy vegetables for the week, recycling old clothes by stitching cloth bags and pillow covers out of them.... she was a picture of conservation and boredom to us.

It was difficult to see her smile as life was always a mission to her and she derived her sense of satisfaction doing things that no one else really wanted to.

No one really loved her or wanted to love her, but she made her place in our lives with her untiring chores. Ten years ago, she had a very horrific death in an accident and now when I have come to understand her contribution to our lives, I often think of her.

Tough life

Married at a very young age, she learnt to live a very tough life in the village - cooking, farming and running her home that included tending to a bed-ridden, invalid and crabby mother-in-law. Widowed early and without a child, all she could do in a small, orthodox village was to fend for herself through hard work.

It was obvious the only relief she found was through work and she directed all her energies into it. Completion of work probably gave her the self-esteem and respect she was searching for.

Her face was lined with the creases of misfortune that she had seen and that she even managed a toothless smile was a miracle after having lived such a punishing life.

I may have not profusely loved my aunt, but that day explaining the story to my child, dampened my eyes and brought back her memories. In a quiet moment, I paid my tribute to her and acknowledged her contribution to my life.