'As long as Amma was alive, it never occurred to me to write about her. But after she passed away, I wrote about her incessantly. For a couple of months after her death, I was devastated by the onslaught of memories that involved her. It was only then that I realised how deeply she had pervaded my entire being,” writes Vasudhendra in the introduction to I Love My Mother, the deceptively simple title of his collection of essays Nammamma Andre Nangishta, recently translated into English by Narayan Shankaran.
Born from grief but containing heaps of humour along with an equal dose of sadness,the book paints a portrait of ‘Amma’ far from deified perfection. Instead, remembering her in all her quirks, frustrations and anger too – directed from mother to son or son to mother. “The norm back then was that ‘mother’ means a divine, altruistic personality. I just moved away from that to say, that’s not the case – she has flaws, desires, and is more or less ordinary,” shares Vasudhendra, adding, “That’s what touched people, not only in Karnataka but readers across who saw their mothers’ lives in my mother’s.” The book, a Kannada bestseller, has won the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Book Prize and a story from it, Amma’s Steel Kingdom is even a chapter in ICSE Kannada textbooks.
Many of his younger readers, he says, discover him after falling in love with this essay about his mother’s love – bordering on obsession – with collecting steel vessels. Like many of the essays, it follows a trail of humour which ends on a sadder or bittersweet note but the sheer fun he has with them often leads to readers sharing funny or surprising stories about their mothers with the writer. “After this book, people started talking to me about their mothers, once, someone came up and told me that their mother used to hide and smoke beedies when she thought nobody was around,” he laughs.
The essays are also deeply rooted in Vasudhendra’s years of growing up in a village in Ballari, then moving away to live and work in a big city and the conflicts that arise from that. With 23 essays in the collection, the writer points to two that stand out to him and which he recommends to every reader, both of which prominently feature Dr. Rajkumar – ‘When Annavru Came to our Town’ and ‘Bioscope’. “The whole of Karnataka can identify how much they craved Dr Rajkumar’s films. It’s beyond worship and it was the same for my mother and me. In Ballari, people are such cinema buffs that if you didn’t take guests to see a movie, they think you don’t treat them well. I tried to capture all of that along with what happened between my father, mother and sister,” he says, adding, “People also liked reading about the life of a village boy – even if they lived 1,000km away from me in Madurai or were 20 years younger, they were able to connect with the life of that village. An Indian-ness comes into picture, with the similar experiences we shared.”
The translation, he says, did a good job of capturing that flavour of Ballari, its cultural nuances and the ‘Ballari Kannada I often use,’ says Vasudhendra. Revisiting the essays during this process, what struck Vasudhendra was ‘the innocence in his writing’. “I have gone through so much of life that I don’t think I can write with the same kind of innocence. It’s difficult because your humour goes down and you become more intellectual,” he concludes.