Dear Mom,
One year has passed, and the void is hard to fill. Every time I cook a dish, I think of some of your recipes, or open my recipe book from the summer of 86 when I took Cooking 101 from you in Ranchi. It still has some of your hand written recipes in it.
What news can I give you? We all went to Lucknow finally in December after so many years and the memories of events and places came flooding back. The highlight of course was a visit to La Martiniere, which is what I was expecting. We even got to visit the basement with the tombstone of the founder, something I never got to do while at school itself.
A lot of people attended the havan in your memory on Jul 20. I participated by skype (how the world has changed). Neetu kindly brought her laptop and set it up so that I could hear and see everything. Daddy is planning a trip to Singapore in ten days, and then in Oct he will be here to celebrate his 80th birthday with us, after Alpana and Sonny's 25th wedding anniversary. We will miss you very much.
With love from Daddy, all of your children and grand children.
Comment from Alpana:
ReplyDeleteOne year has passed and it still feels unreal that the person who was so invincible is not around. Ma was strength personified. She was as efficient as a computor. She found time for a brisk morning walk at dawn, read the newspaper with her tea, cooked for everyone and then settled down to watch TV..with her knitting!! "I am not wasting time" she would retort. The constant jerking of the sofa while her hands furiously knitted away, was only still when it was too hot to knit. She knitted and sewed for us (she emboidered a Kantha bedcover for me 2 months before she passed away), She knitted a sweator for Monica, and many baby sets for kids yet to be born in the family!
She had an amazing memory for dates and was always my back up for family birthdays and anniversaries.
We were all so used to this fiesty ball of energy ruling our lives, and taking decisions until the very end, that even though we knew that she was going.....the silence was unbearable when she went.
One year only...and yet its like the passing of an era....All the things she did have gone with her...hand knitted sweators, home made pickles (no one made the shalgam,gaajar, gobi achaar like her)
Bundles of tatting laces, the constant whirring of the sewing machine (she turned left over fabrics into pretty baby frocks for all her maids' kids..I found half a dozen frocks lying neatly stitched for future kids)
It seems that in the almost 72 years that she lived, she did the work of 144 years! She worked with such efficiency and was like a hurricane in the kitchen...it was almost as if some internal clock was telling her that she does not have enough time.
Ma-Tulika shifted to her hostel today. We dropped her after a visit to the temple and she starts her classes at NUS tomorrow. I know you would have been so proud of her. Tanvi will be back soon from Japan. Daddy will be with us soon, but we will always feel your absence. Ma- you will always be in our hearts.
Dear Alpana - very nicely written. Mom had a lot of energy and was always active. Even when she came here, she wanted to do various projects around the house!
DeleteDear Alpana - very nicely written. Mom had a lot of energy and was always active. Even when she came here, she wanted to do various projects around the house!
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