My mom! And her heart!

On the day she left us alone and went far away, I decided to analyse the mind and the heart of the human! For she was a mother alright; but much bigger than that! She was my model human being; For the day I got married, my sister came to me and said, "Sam, don't expect your wife to be like your mother, for you will be disappointed, nobody can be like her". Not to belittle wifey's greatness, my sister was right! 

She had a complex brain, but my mother was a simple human being; Lemme explain. 

She did the right thing!  On the day when she was diagnosed with final stage cancer and in immense pain and agony, she remembered to check on her aunt and uncle and transferred some money and medicine for them, without even telling them what she is going through. When they both passed away(Same day)she, on chemo, gathered all her will to travel long, vomiting all the way, once to see the lifeless bodies of the aunt and uncle. Her greatest strength was the strength of the heart to control the mind, the body and their pulls and to do the right thing, every time. Like everyone, she had mood swings. Times of depression and anxiety. But even during those times, she always did the right thing. That remarkable ability to make the mind and the body listen to her heart, I think was her greatest gift. 

She was kind! We all knew that. She showed tremendous kindness for the world around; There would have been at least 20 old people who had lived in our house at various points of time and everyone was showered with kindness. In fact, mommy once got a letter from a random old lady saying she had heard about her kindness, asking whether she can come and live with amma since her children were not kind to her. But that is not what made her different. The difference is her heart's ability to show love, uncompromised love, even when her mind was not on it. There were days when friends were a pain; when her mind asked her to hate the family; when the body is tired on the inside, but on the outside, she could be showering love! And her heart bled love! No that is not hypocrisy; That is overcoming the humanness within, and she was a master at it.  The day she died, an old man, in rugged clothes, fell prostrate on the coffin and cried "Where do we go for love ma, where do we the poor go for love?" And that summed up her life. 

She was a workaholic! She could pull off an 18-hour workday easily without even looking at the watch. As a professional now, when I look back at her life, her greatest victory was not, not looking at the watch for 18 hours but the ability to cheat her mind into doing the same workdays, through the year, for more than 25 years without taking a break. In my living memory, I haven't known a time when she had taken a break (taken her mind completely off work) even for a day. The modern professional world believes and rightly so, taking breaks help to increase efficiency; but I'm sure, my mom would not have agreed for her heart had the great ability to trick the brain into doing what the heart wanted to do every day with maximum efficiency without a stop.

Finally, she let us be! I think that was the greatest struggle within. She had an idea of the world. She wanted her children to be that idea, like every normal human being. You could see the struggle within when we protested. One could sense her heart bleed. But never once she stopped us from doing what our hearts wanted us to do. In the prime of my career, in the glitter of the IT world, when the company was about to send me to the Netherlands for work, my heart resisted the idea. We were on our family trip to a neighbouring hill station, and the mother and I went for a long walk. I don't remember where dad and the brother were, perhaps eating ice creams. I had her hand on her shoulder as best friends do. "I'm not happy ma, in my work. Something is amiss. This is not what I want to do all my life", I told her. "I want to go to the remote mission fields of the terror hit Assam". I could sense her shock. Her heart did stop a second. Here is her son, planning to quit a high flying corporate career and a lot of money wanting to live in a tribal belt supposedly terror hit for less than half the salary. There was a long pause. A deep breath. And my mother said, "If that is where you are happy, I think that is what you should do"; 

As I reflect on her life now, I see a simple human being. She was not highly read. Not the biggest scholar. She was afraid to talk to strangers. Not the most travelled. But her biggest ability is to win over her mind and body and let her heart rule. Perhaps the heart was ruled by someone else!