Popagandhi

In four days, my family is sure to wake up, quite literally, to a new development - my mother’s new employment status. It is an employment status none of us have a living memory of, for we have never known her to be “not employed”. From prior experience, I know this to mean only one thing: her waking up at the same time, pacing about, unused to not having anything to do, coming into our rooms to say, “Girl ah! Boy ah! So late already! ALREADY seven o’clock!”

Once every couple of months was something we could put up with. But everyday for the next.. infinite number of years? Somehow, I’m not so sure.

At 49, my mother is tired of working - and why shouldn’t she? She has been in the health sector for nearly three decades. Having a mother as a nurse is an interesting position to be in; one who used to be a midwife, even more so. I didn’t give much thought to it until someone pointed it out to me: isn’t it just a little weird that your mother has delivered every child in the extended family, including all your cousins, and probably would have delivered her own too, if not for whatever physical impediments childbirth might bring?

I remember tagging along to the lunch meetings she used to have with her friends from the nursing college, how as time progressed and people got married, had children, moved into nice apartments, the meetings had shifted from restaurants and cafes, to more homely settings. I didn’t make much out of it then, but I recently had the thought, while remembering many of the friends were also midwives - I must have been traumatised as a child, when I went to lunch and all my mother’s friends had to say was, “What a big girl you are now, last I saw you was when I cut your umbiblical cord.” But I think I’m more disturbed by the thought that my mother can wash babies at a rate of 10 babies every five minutes, assembly line style, and what implications that might have meant for me as a baby when occupational habits spilled over into the private sphere.

Towards the end of her career she moved away from shift work to work in departments which had office hours, within the hospital. The last stint involved work at the hospital’s blood centre, attached to the university and medical school of the same name. At one point I was seriously dating a medical student, and she, being aware of it, began sleuthing almost immediately, with impressive results.

Ever since then, no medical student of Indian origin was ever safe walking through the hospital.

Her work in a hospital affiliated with the local university had other dangerous implications. One of them was her direct contact with people around my age group, who had gone to the same schools, or had friends of my friends of my friends. From her conversations with the blood donors/students (mind you, this was never my university), she had arrived at the conclusion: “everybody knows her daughter”, since, it seems, each time she struck up conversation and mentioned my name, the person almost always turned out to be somebody whom I knew, or who knew me.

She had mused, “both my kids are so famous” (my dad quickly added, “maybe infamous”); a situation I tried to defuse by explaining perhaps a large number of my friends were enthusiastic blood donors. But knowing how too many of my friends would fail to qualify as donors, by failing what I call the “morality prerequisite” of donating blood, I highly doubt that theory myself. What I do know, however, is that she began assuming everyone from that university was an acquaintance of mine; and according to more than one source - “the entire population of blood donors, who may or may not have been in your acquaintance, didn’t need to call you to find out what you scored at the A levels.”

Always having been a working mother, I suppose she missed out on some aspects of our childhood. Nobody ever sent me to school. There was never a packed lunch except on her free days. Not much of a shopper herself, we both missed out on that famous aspect of mother/daughter bonding, and I never revealed any inkling of a passion for cooking either, so all the time we spent together was in front of the TV (to which she is addicted), or in front of baskets of xiao long bao (to which I am addicted), so we never had too many avenues for communication. We’ve become a lot closer over the last year or so, than ever before: she is now a Mac user, an aficionado of eyebrow threading services in Little India, and has one foot testing the waters of my beloved Indian food.

I admire her for the very quality I had never possessed - straightforwardness. Not in the “simple” kind of way, but rather the kind of dedication she has; for my father, whom she has loved since she was 15, for her every effort at inventing dishes for her culinarily demanding but altogether lazy daughter, for her love of God. She has never been one for literature or language, but she is proud of having helped to develop me in that area; she had never been one for loud music either, yet would turn up at my brother’s gigs with earplugs.

It’s been a long time since, but I don’t have a clearer image of what love is, than when my parents held me, giving thanks and blessings after praying together, then got up earlier than usual to make a Thermosflask full of espresso to keep me awake for my examination.