Ma, tujhe salaam...

Sanjeev Singh Bariana

MY father was in a transferable job as an officer in the CRPF and generally posted to sensitive postings in the North-East when I was a kid during the 1970s.

Often, my sister and I were forced to shift school mid-session, and so, they decided to put me in a hostel at Dalhousie. Without a thought to losing out the privileges she enjoyed camping in the officer’s accommodation, my mother decided to shift to our village in Hoshiarpur district.

Besides shifting to a permanent base that would be better suited for the education of her children, she always desired going back to look after my ageing grandfather, a retired Major, who stayed by himself. 

I would go to my village during winter vacation where her day would start before the break of dawn, milking buffaloes, and ending it with washing dishes after the family had dinner. Her only break came in the afternoon for her tea break when she sat in the company of her best friend, the wife of a JCO in the Army.

When my mother retired for the night, I would, unfailingly, start cribbing about my hostel life. ‘Daddy and you don’t love me. That is why you have put me in hostel.’  She would hear me out patiently, gently running her hand through my hair. She would cajole me into sleeping, narrating stories of Roop Basant, Sarvan Puttar, Bhakt Prahlad, Bala-Mardana, among others.

A night before I was set to leave for school, she would pull out money from different corners of the house to give me pocket money. A last-minute bonus came from a ‘guthli’(a purse) on her hip when I bade the final bye.

When I went to college, my expenditure multiplied. New-found freedom from a school hostel meant party time. We started watching a lot of movies, partying wild and also travelling. I went to my village only to take money. Invariably, I would ask for a huge amounts, quoting expenditure on books, notes, tuitions. She would say she needed money for my sister and to run the home. Long discussions would always end in me getting a lot more than I actually expected.

Once I sought money for a trip to Goa. ‘No, not this time,’ she said, ‘I have saved some money for buying a gas burner and a cylinder. It gets very difficult in front of the ‘chulha’during scorching summer.’

In the heat of the moment, I blurted, ‘You don’t want me to explore the world and learn so that I can become something big in my life. You, instead, want your cooking to be a luxury!’ The next morning, as I was leaving, she gave me the amount I had asked for. 

I visited the village towards the end of the same summer. When I went to the kitchen for a meal in the evening, I saw my mother push a log inside the chulha, blowing air through the phookna to ignite the fire. ‘You did not buy the cylinder?’ I asked, sheepish. Sweeping aside a tuft of hair on her sweaty forehead, she said, ‘Food cooked on a gas does not retain the original flavours. It tastes a thousand times better when cooked on coal.’