Mai by Geetanjali Shree Presents Us With A Mother-heroine

Mai by Geetanjali Shree translated to English as Mai: Silently Mother by Nita Kumar offers an insight to the three generations of women and men around them set in a North Indian middle-class family. An excerpt:

Our childhood moulders and guardians were these: our grandfather, dada, who used to be a landlord, and whose feet babu would touch, for form’s sake, and after saying his ‘charanasparsh, babuji’ would then carefully avoid; our grandmother, dadi, who was our mother’s mother-in-law and had been her own mother-in-law’s daughter-in-law; our father, babu, who was a raja and beloved by his mother more than he could ever hope to be by a lover; our mother, mai, who was uneducated, voiceless, and a round pot without shape—all because she made

up her mind on the basis of the scene unfolding before her, rather than on preconceptions.

The deepest etched image of this childhood remains our togetherness, saving mai, getting out the house, and getting mai out. Mai was with us when we fed the peacocks in the courtyard. We asked mai for the chaff from the flour to dust on to the anthills and then watched their teeming activity. We gave fitting responses to those who attacked mai with insults and sarcasm. We left the house by the back door known only to mai, to my girlfriends who  had brothers and to other odd, exciting places. We lived together in one room and shared everything.

But our school did not take boys after class four and Subodh went off to another city, and I went alone every morning on a red rickshaw to ‘Sunny Side Convent’. We had nuns in our school who were either from South India or, red-faced, from Ireland. Mother Maria played the piano while we sang Christmas carols:

—Silent night, holy night

All is calm, all is bright...

and

—The first Noel

The angels did sing...

The first period in school was Moral Science, every day. We did an exam on it but the marks were not counted in the finals. We were taught morality preached by Jesus Christ and other great Western religious figures, after which we were considered fortified with good thoughts for good conduct for the whole day.

Sometimes the padre came to speak to us. The whole school gathered in the hall and we rejoiced that two or three periods would be wasted that way.

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Father told us, ‘Dear girls, the Lord has made you perfect like apples, round, red, sweet. But, remember, to keep this you must

not let anyone touch you. Bite an apple and you mar its beauty.’

We were things to look at.

It seems that no one had told him that an apple was not something to look at, but to taste. It’s sweet. If you just keep it, it will dry and rot and worms will finish it up inside.

That is, if we chose to be precise about his suggestion of apples, we were things to taste.

Thus, we were taught from childhood about being apples. You are an apple, be careful, very careful, look out, save yourself,

look out for the tasters, save yourself.

The fact that one day the apple would be tasted was an unspoken truth on which hung a huge lock of silence.

Excerpted with permission from Mai: Silently Mother by Geetanjali Shree translated by Nita Kumar.

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