I love reading the slim volume, "A room of one's own" and wander into the minefield of a woman's life. My mother would have loved Virginia Woolf, but I doubt she ever read her. She liked religious and spiritual books and detective novels. Woolf talks of the strange monster that is conjured up with the composite of the two perceptions of women- one in literature and the other in reality of daily life. In my mother I saw all the conflicting pulls of that composite. My mother was born the year Woolf wrote the essay. India was drugged and sleeping under British rule, so women were steeped in tradition. My grandfather was a lawyer, intelligent but poor and struggling. Only 3 children survived beyond the age of 10 out of may be 5 or 6 born to my grandmother. She was sickly and she eventually succumbed to tuberculosis which was fatal in those days. So it was that my mother and her two brothers were left motherless.A girl child in a poor household was not exactly welcomed with joy. She was a 'burden'. But she was thankfully not denied basic schooling. In those days she went to a private school run by church missionaries called St. Ann's. She would later tell me how she used to be scared to take the reminder slip given in school for late payment of fees to her father, who sat silently reading his books. I am somehow convinced that her eldest brother would have had an easier time getting his fees paid.You see an older son is always looked at as inheriting the rightful place of 'head of the family' as the potential breadwinner for the family. These are underlying, unsaid plans that are written as and when children were born. In a motherless household, my mother as a little girl had no one to teach her the little nuances that fill the growing up days. Of course, all or any instruction she got was by the way of admonitions and scoldings when she made a mistake. She had formidable aunts, my grandmother's sisters who would have these nephews and niece over for holidays. These aunts were outspoken and direct in their opinions about the status of 'these motherless children' Who were these aunts ? One aunt was a widow at 18 and lived on the charity of her siblings. The other aunt was well off but all accounts of her life reveal a vibrant personality chained by domesticity, there was a bristling anger and bite to her words. My mother discovered the pleasure of reading early in life. She loved escaping into the fantasy world of stories, fairy tales, mythology, puranas and scriptures. So it is that as a young woman my mother grew up with strictures and admonitions. However, having had no mother to slowly mould her to a malleable, docile girl day in and day out, my mother I feel must have lived out her imaginary dreams in her head and only temporarily reigned in her ebullient nature. She would do anything to win the approval of her aunts. In her nature she carried an independent streak which she hid from all the adults and elders around her. It was after her marriage to my father and after her children were born that she revealed her individuality to the fullest extent. My father doted on her though he was conservative and would not give her permission to go out and work. He passed on all the duties of the household which he did not much care for like going to our schools for admissions and registration, taking us to the doctor etc. She thrived on opportunities to meet people. She was not shy or nervous when meeting with people in authority and being aritculate in English she was bold and confident. My father knew how to speak English after all he went to work in a British company but he was a reticent man. After 3 sons when she became pregnant again she was the one who decided that she would not have any more children. She hoped for a girl and when I was born she underwent an operation which would stop her from becoming pregnant. My mother was truly progressive. My father's older brother's wife continued to have 3 more children after her eighth child who was born the same year as I was. I always feel proud of my mother's decision to stop further pregnancies. Life was not easy. My father had to struggle to educate all four of us on his salary. We would have been in dire straits if there had been more children.
And yet, I have resented the fact that my mother never imagined a different life for me. She was very clear about what my future was going to be. I was to be married off when I was 19. A good career and education - these my brothers had to aim for, whereas I was going to study only as a stop-gap enroute to a good marriage. This was not voiced but in her actions she betrayed her bias. Though she scolded me for an average academic performance, she was usually away on a good- samaritan assignment out of town during my exams. Her household duties would devolve upon me. My mother was such a strange mix of contradictions like this. I have of course wondered at my own lack of vision and back-bone. But ever since I can remember from the earliest memories of being a 5 or 6 year old I have felt the gentle pressure to be the obedient one. She would sit me down and tell me of her deprived and motherless childhood. I have felt the intense guilt of sadness. It was as if I was witnessing someone being ill-treated in front of me and somehow it was 'all my fault'. It has been so many years back but I now realize that these stories wherein my mother was the little, lost girl - these stories were the warm liquid pored into my sensibilities and slowly and surely they turned me into a malleable personality. I do not think ever that my mother did this in an intentional and deliberate manner, nevertheless these stories have seeped into the core of my being forever defined who I am. I have always been tied to my mother's very soul. I suppose when one carries something extra one slows down. I have felt this drag all my life.
I was born on a Friday morning. Fridays are considered auspicious. It is the day of the Goddess Laxmi. My mother wanted to name me after this Goddess. Her aunt wanted her to name me after her husband as I was born a week after he had passed away. His name was Sitaramayya, so my grandmother ( mother's aunt) would have liked my name to have been Sitalaxmi. My mother was adamant, she did not want me named after the tragic incarnation of Sita- that princess who had to go to the forest for 14 years with her dear husband, then be abducted by the demon-king Ravana. No way, my mother firmly believed that all the women who took any of the different names of Sita suffered terrible tragedies. I love this story of how I got my name. In defiance of an aunt whom she really respected and loved, my mother named me Vijayalaxmi- Goddess of Victory. This I think was a victory for my mother- a true victory in my eyes. I was a beautiful child. People stopped and stared at me and complimented my mother. Once a professional photographer who was travelling on the train with us took a series of pictures of me and passed on some to a newspaper. I sometimes wonder how this adulation of me as a baby affected my three older brothers. They were little children too. It must have been hard to be alongside a little 'doll' who got everyone's attention. I know my brothers always teased me as I grew up with stories about how I had been bought from the shop for one paise. That used to annoy me no end. I think it was their way of getting back at me for grabbing all the attention.
Coming back to Virginia Woolf's book on the conditioning that women received, how it made for insurmountable barriers to their growing up to become thinkers and writers and artists, I do not wonder at all how that conditioning got transmitted through generations. I am proof of one of the ways this kind of conditioning gets perpetuated. My mother's irrepressible energy was never acknowledged. She had to hide it to be able to get any shred of approval. So many women of her generation and earlier generations found escape from their bound lives only into marriages. Even these marriages were not by their choice- financial necessity or someone else's agendas were the motivation behind those decisions. Of course, in my mother's case there is the fact that she was on a quest for love. But what has always fascinated me about her is that she has embodied both independence of spirit and a complete conformity to how a woman must be according to the dictates of society. She had a strange and intense hold on me. I obeyed her and listened to her more than a child my age would normally do. It was hard for me to rebel against her dictates, exactly because her dictates were not overt and direct. They were like oil rubbed into my soul and slowly seeped into me and made me pliant.
This is a kind of internal journey that occurred after reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The year she gave the talk - 1928 my mother was born. India gained independence in 1947 and so my mother grew up in a country run by foreign merchants and a foreign empire. The tragedies in her life were enacted against the backdrop of an intensely conservative, traditional, poor Brahmin household. Who she was, has affected my life and my personality and it has been the leitmotif of my life- my relationship with her. I have always tried to pry apart that part of me that is me and that part that is my mother. This has consumed me throughout my life.
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