It was a chilly Saturday morning in Delhi which had taken on an ominous edge. My 67-year-old mother-in-law’s battle for life had reached its waning phase. Both her kidneys were failing, toxins playing havoc with her frail body. Her heartbeat was slowing down and acute anaemia had hit hard at her immune system.
An intrepid lady all her life, my mother-in-law lay etherised on the ICU bed, motionless, with a vacuous and impassive look peeping through the oxygen mask.
The place was a morbid jumble of bleeping monitors and whirring machines. Perhaps she was losing the adamantine will to fight back, to look life in the face and say, ‘Look, I am young enough to live and have many responsibilities to fulfil before I shuffle off the mortal coils.’
For close to 30 years, my mother-in-law lived sans her husband. She was barely 38 when her husband, a professor of architecture, died in a road accident at 44. My wife was then 15, and in Class X.
As the chain of events turned their life upside down, my mother-in-law didn’t wallow in self-pity. She knew her first responsibility was to bring up her daughter, who needed emotional and moral support. She knew that if she too let the tragedy and negativity overwhelm her, she would be doing injustice to her daughter.
My mother-in-law was offered the job of a librarian in her husband’s office and thus began her new journey from a housewife to a working woman. Even as she tried to come to terms with the enormity of the tragedy, she was not keeping good health. Moreover, the tension of her daughter’s education and marriage remained at the back of her mind. She developed high blood pressure. After some years, her fluctuating sugar level became a concern for my wife, who had become a post-graduate in English literature.
After much persuasion we had an arranged marriage, to the satisfaction of my mother-in-law. She was riding a tsunami of sympathy as everybody including my parents felt happy the void in their daughter-in-law’s life would be filled by the presence of brothers-in-law, father-in-law and also mother-in-law.
But a few months into the marriage, things started getting a little bitter and rancorous. My mother-in-law, despite her indifferent health, was still going to work. My wife was not able to take her mind off worries as her well-being remained her prime concern. We would visit her every alternate day. This somewhat angered my parents, who thought my wife was not paying enough attention to her new home and was instead showing her attachment more to her mother even after marriage.
This went on for more than a year. Nothing, it seemed, was going right.
Finally, much against everybody’s wishes, I decided to shift to my mother-in-law’s flat with my wife to make sure she didn’t have to live a lonely life. People got sarcastic about me in no time. I was dubbed ghar jamai (a pejorative term in north India). My parents came up with numerous conspiracy theories and even blamed my mother-in-law for instigating her daughter and son-in-law against them.
We had a daughter after some time. My mother-in-law’s joy knew no bounds. She left her job to spend time with her grand-daughter. Over the next 18 years she made all kinds of investments in my daughter’s name from her pension to make sure she didn’t lack money while pursuing her higher studies. She also kept advising us to make regular investments for our old age since I had a non-pensionable job.
She may not have been my biological mother, but she was every inch my mother, treating me as her own son, reprimanding me when I made any mistakes, coming up with a plethora of suggestions and ideas if my wife and I were unable to solve a problem on our own. She was a beacon of hope all through.
At times she would feel unhappy at her severed relation with my parents just because of some misunderstanding, which till her last day never got sorted. Her in-your-face approach to and bold stand on life often made her unpopular among people but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t know how to speak with a forked tongue.
After fending off the grim reaper for four consecutive days, she finally gave up as death laid its icy hands on her. Even a few months before her death, she would talk about seeing her granddaughter going to college from July this year, a long-cherished dream she couldn’t fulfil.
mukherjee.dashing@gmail.com