Kids have their uses

I have been sitting on this mother tag for what must be at least a decade. Some bloggers have written on the joys of motherhood and some on the challenges it poses. I’m right now in a rather charitable mood so I’ll write about umm… err… the ‘benefits’ of being a mother:

Free child labour: With a duster in hand my daughter makes the furniture and windows glisten. The son can spend a solid half hour in the attic, profusely seating and unearthing various things for me. Plus there are the endless errands to get 100 gm green chilli, ‘one more’ cucumber, and so forth. No payment. Ignore the grumbles.

Captive fan club: You may dish out the most insipid sambar and uninspiring carrot curry but these, by default, are your kids’ comfort food. Did you grind your teeth when your husband remarked that his mother made the most wonderful curd rice? Take heart – history will repeat itself in about 20 years. Have you ever heard an adult, especially male and married, complain about his mother’s cooking?

Knowledge recycling: You may have often regretted spending a good part of your youth learning stuff that you never use. When your kids study, all that you learned will come rushing in, and you can point out in a superior voice that “Mass is measured in a beam balance while Weight is measured in a spring balance.” Why, even your saralivarisai and jandavarisai gnan is occasionally deployed.

Language enrichment: Your kids add several dimensions to previously tame words. You understand that paruppu and vennai are not necessarily edible items. Or that “ingappaarraa” is not a gentle invitation to view something.

Smart messengers: With some rigorous training from you, your kids will ask their grandfather to turn down the TV volume or remind their dad that your birthday is around the corner. The emphasis is on ‘training’. Else, the tutored lines will be prefixed or suffixed with “Amma said so”.

You were wrong, Amma

You said the toughest thing for a mother is to watch her daughter in labour. There’s something scarier, Amma – it’s watching your teenaged son on a bicycle. Especially when your son imagines he’s a macho hero driving a bike.

Just wondering…8

What was the Creator’s great idea in keeping the reproductive outlet so close to the excretory one? Why make it all so difficult in terms of hygiene and… hmm… the messiness quotient. Why, for half the population, the same plumbing is forced to multi-task.  Did He fall so short of flesh and bones that He had to take up such austerity measures? Is somebody up there listening?

A new home and a dozen other things

We are rebuilding our house. It’s an ancient two-storied, shelf-less, rodent and termite-ridden relic that might have been named a national heritage building had we not decided to pull it down. How we came to the decision could fill a 400-page book so I keep off that topic.

Since we couldn’t get a flat close by we’ve shifted to a nearby locality. The rent is gorging into our salaries but I’m not really complaining. This new place is quite nice – close to the market, school, bus-stop, etc. The best thing is an ancient temple which is small but has the most impressive deities.

I suspect about 100 years ago our locality was an agrahaaram aligned with that temple. The old street houses have of course been replaced by sprawling bungalows and duplex apartments, thanks to a steady inflow of Silicon Valley dollars (just like Kerala houses with green walls and orange roofs scream Gulf money, the existence of an NRI son can easily be guessed by the interiors of a Chennai house).

But we the people of this locality would like to mentally belong to the previous century, thank you. We will have marble flooring and stained glass for all our windows but we shall let in the servant maid only through a separate entrance.

We have three different sinks – stainless steel for puja things, a black slab one for the utensils and another for the plates, spoons and assorted ‘echchal’ stuff. If you interchange their uses, the servant kills you with a look. Yes, a long innings in this locality has made the servant maids staunch followers of the madi system. The bathroom has a separate cupboard for soaps and shampoos to be used exclusively during three days a month.

If you hit the terrace at around six in the evening, you can see an assortment of mamas in various stages of sandhyavandanam. Then the mamas greet each other (only English, please), water their respective rooftop gardens (table rose and thulasi maadam), pick up the dried clothes and go down – they are now eligible for a second round of evening coffee.

Come Ammavaasai and our area looks festive. Mamas race around in their Honda Civics, wearing panchagajam and naamam/vibuthi pattais, to catch an ‘earlier round’ of tharpanam at a temple. Mamis bring out their madisaars and beg the crows to peck at their rice. The servant maids tread around the house so carefully that you wish you could give them special madi-proof gear so that they don’t really have to behave like burglars.

Peerkanga thogayal, pooshanikkai kootu, seeram-molagu rasam

• How I wish they would serve the above menu at feasts. Who says feasts need to be pulses- and coconut-laden?

• Those who haven’t eaten this don’t know what they’re missing in life.

• The person who formulated rasam and did not bother to patent it is God’s greatest gift to mankind.

• If I had to go off rice for more than two days I would die or at least go into depression.

• I would rather suffer weight-related illnesses than depression or anorexia.

• No, a middle ground does not exist.

Sonny

Alert: Rambling post with excessive mush

As I saw my son walk out of the examination center with his friends my heart was filled with a strange emotion. I thought it was anxiety. But it was so pleasant that it couldn’t quite be that.

Paiyyan and his gang have been together since kindergarten. I remember them in palm-length shorts, blowing their noses and weeping on their LKG teacher’s shoulders. I can recall them going on their first excursion, to Guindy Park, waving madly from the school bus, as if they were boarding a flight to Hawaii. I remember them entering high school and wearing full-length trousers for the first time, looking dwarfed and quite lost in the ocean that’s their high school.

And here they were, walking out of the exam hall, doing a post-mortem of their question paper, looking horrified and delighted in turn, generally being 15-year-old boys.

I get a similarly strange feeling sometimes when Paiyyan calls me “Amma”. Coming off a human being as tall as me – and close to becoming taller than me – it sounds funny. I can’t quite believe that I’ve produced such a fine specimen of my species. I suppose I’m sounding like a swine showing off her litter but then God made us mothers alike.

Soon, Paiyyan & Friends will lose some of their happy boyhood to IIT coaching, or lose their IIT opportunities to happy boyhood. Then will come the smuggled cigarettes, beer and maybe girlfriends. I hope he’s a good boy beyond that. I hope. I pray. As a parent, I can do only that. One of my kids is no longer a kid. He’s a young man. As a child he has his freedom and as a parent I have my limitations.

It’s good to have children. I’m not saying it’s awful not to have them. I do know couples who’re perfectly at peace with not having kids.

But I am convinced that kids give meaning to life. We don’t need them to care for us in our old age or to light our funeral pyres. We need them so that we have something to look forward to tomorrow.

I suddenly understand why people queue up at fertility clinics and why there’s such a huge global adoption business operating in various shades of grey. I understand why my local poo-kaari (flower seller) is selling her solitary pair of gold earrings to tug her alcoholic husband along to this temple.

Vote of thanks

To those of you who were nice enough to wish my son.

He’s done quite well, scoring comfortably above 90%. That’s a target he had set for himself. The latent mean, pushy mother in me wishes he’d set the target at 95%. The regular me is of course thrilled to bits.

Circa 2011 March I shall be back with a similar request for Paiyyan’s 12th exams. Do help

Where is the Paati

Sylvan surroundings. Sparkling roads. Sky blue swimming pool, no-sweat no-grime gyms, the works. I can quite understand property developers painting pictures of their projects that are rosy bordering on mithai pink. But please tell me why these pictures are invariably populated by distinctly western looking inhabitants.

Look at the picture below.

Micro-minied girl walking her dog, suited-booted men looking like they just held an EGM in the community park. Where is the servant maid throwing a black garbage cover just outside the Neel Metal Fanalca dustbin? The sweaty boys playing street cricket? Where is the Paati walking furiously to bring down her sugar level?

Not model material these, I suppose.

An award. Thanks

I’ve said this before – I don’t do awards. They don’t come to me often either, I must add. But when they did, I accepted them gratefully without actually “pasting” the colorful, jigna-ed emblems on my blog page, since I don’t approve of them much.

This award saves me the trouble, for it doesn’t have an emblem anyway.

I don’t really lose much sleep over ‘non-deserving’ blogs bagging awards. It’s akin to Vaira Nenjam getting high TRP ratings – if the audience like it it’s their problem. However, as I said earlier, I do feel sad when genuinely good blogs don’t get adequate recognition.

Now comes the pick: My vote goes to Chutneycase. I do not know her, online or offline, and chanced on her blog via Blogeswari’s page. She’s the puliyodharai answer to Asal Tamizh Penn’s vatha kuzhumbu Just as tangy, just as spicy. Her blog is several times more popular than mine – she hardly needs my encouragement – but I still think she deserves more recognition.

You know you are fat…

…when your nine-year-old draws a family portrait like this:

Yeah, that’s daughter, son, mother and father