The light of my world now lights all the world
Legacy of a ’Bad’ Woman recalled as Ma switches old garments for new
For The Flower Always in Bloom: February 1930 to November 4 2021
This Divali offers me an ethereal opportunity to share my Ma who lit my world with all the world.
When you open your homes to receive the blessings of Mother Lakshmi this Divali evening, be prepared, because the Goddess will be bringing a guest. Her Plus 1? My Ma.
When you light your first deeya, my Ma will be with you too, as the first star that comes up to light the sky since she rose in the early hours of this holy day – as, indeed she has most of her life -to ascend to the more sacred tasks ahead, a greater motherhood.
When you hear that strain of a special song to the Divine Mother, listen for the echo of the voice of my Matarani who so loved to sing that she found rhymes and melodies in the most mundane of phrases. Her accompaniment would be her favourite instrument, the dholak. Like her, it is derived from the ancestral strains – the percussion of kawwali, kirtan, lawan and bhangra wedding traditions that have passed into our indigeneous chutney and other local IndoCaribbean folk music which are part of the Indian Indentured Immigrant Routes and Roots through the diaspora that embraces Asia Pacific, Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean.
My Ma’s mortal talents matched her immortal spirit that refused to be limited by the social limitations imposed on her. The brands of illegitimacy and illiteracy stamped on her oficial documents by an alien and intrusive culture, pale to the Hindi letters, ???/Ram tattooed onto her arm. Not having a choice in her life partner, a newly-wedded teenager, she took her fate into her own hands and had the ??? tattoo from a calligraphist passing through the village and wore it triumphantly throughout her life baring it as proof of her daring and devotion like a devout Hanuman. Unstated is her bilingualism in the face of the llfounded labels of illiteracy, deprived, as girl children were, of formal schooling.
Born in Navet, but whisked away to grow up with an aunt and uncle in Fyzabad, she rationalised her spirited sharp tongue and sharp wit, with the pun, ‘Fyzabad ‘oman bad too bad.’
‘And you is a branch,’ she would remind me hotly, as the strong will I inherited from her clashed with her own as cymbals – sometimes resonating in unison, sometimes in discordance.
Light of my life
Tonight Ma lights the heavens, having moulded me like the potters’ the clay of the deeyas that will light up the earth during this Festival of Lights.
She oiled my ambitions and fuelled the fire of my aspirations laying the quick wick from the length of her lack of options and opportunity.
My Ma, My Muse. My Mentor. She inspired the concept behind the Woman Agents of Change initiative that I conceived to celebrate the achievements of the unrecognised, invisible women at the wheel like her. That was adopted as by the Commonwealth Caribbean and is now spreading as an initiative throughout the systems of the United Nations.
Ma’s multiple intelligences fed my curiosity into the research that populated my doctoral thesis – to give rightful place to the invisible cultural traditions that try to render her invisible and insubstantial too. Seeped into my first published book, Finding A Place, that maps the seeding of a multicultural nation and its diaspora branches that is now evolving into part of the trilogy of the MultiMedia MicroEpic – mDNA – Mothers, Motherlands, MotherCultures and MotherContinent.
Her role as Muse and her singular efforts to ensure my secondary education, against great odds, frame the intergenerational links I underscore in the MultiMedia MicroEpic Biopic, One Night To Bloom that created waves at the International Women’s Day/Commonwealth Day 2021 Forum on its reléase.
Ma’s firm faith and belief in my abilities – Your Wealth Is Your Mind, has been my anchor and my buoy , in life’s rough and unpredictable seas and struggles against the tides
My Ma’s nondescript existence may be humble, but it is not small.
Outliving all her contemproraries, she gave bountifully, expecting nothing in return. To her life is in itself a gift, and that gift she enjoyed fully.
That is her legacy: for her children and grand children and great grand children and great grand children spawned in a small island and scattered across the globe. From her palms, so shaped and moulded, she offered me the world, and now to the world, I offer her, My Ma. My Muse.
My Ma, has now changed her earthly garments for the etherealian silk.
As a person sheds worn-out garments and dons new ones, So too does the soul cast off a worn-out body and takes a new one/
Vasansi iraní yatha vihaya navani grihnati naro ’parani/ atha sharirani vihaya ??????? ???????? ??? ????? ????? ???????? ????????? | / ??? ??????? – Bhagavat Gita Songs of the Lord: Chapter 2 V. 22
More Musings about Ma: What My Mother Told Me