I looked up on the Internet. The distance from Madras to Lahore is 1,328 miles. Madras to Maruthuvakudi is about 150 miles. So grandfather was right when he told my mother that Lahore was 1,500 miles away. “You are not afraid to go that far, are you?” he had asked. Decades later, while narrating the incredible story of her migration from Maruthuvakudi to Lahore, my mother could recall her father’s question but not her reply. Probably no answer was expected of her as the alliance was already firmed up and the wedding date fixed.
Amma could recall one other rhetorical question that was thrown at her by relatives. “`140 per month! What will you do with so much money?” The princely salary of the prospective son-in-law effectively distracted from every one’s mind, the fact that the 14-year-old girl was leaving home for the first time to join her new husband in a place that was one-and-a-half thousand miles away. We children were in complete awe of mother’s migration. How did she manage in a completely alien place?
Perhaps Lahore masi made the difference. Lahore masi was the landlady of the house which was my parents’ first home. She was the one who introduced amma to winter clothes, mustard oil, chula, wheat rotis and a host of other things.
In time it became a two-way street. Masi sought father’s help in an area where her skills were deficient. Masi’s husband was a trader who travelled frequently. To make sure the man was not fooling around, when the man was out, masi would get the letters he sent to father and check if they were all related to his business! Father obliged as he didn’t have the courage or the vocabulary to tell masi that he didn’t feel comfortable doing it!
Masi trusted my parents not just to keep this secret but also to keep her jewels safe. Whenever her husband’s relatives visited, she would pass on a batua containing all her jewels to my parents. The standing instruction was that it should be hidden inside the rice tin in our house till the visitors left! Mother never opened the batua. But she carried the memory of the richly embroidered, red velvet bag with drawstrings.
I have a special connection with the Lahore masi. Story goes that the first thing that the nurse at the hospital where I was born told my mom was, “Your daughter has a big nose!” Later, when father saw me, the prominent nose caught his attention too. “She looks like our Lahore masi!” he had commented. And I was named ‘Kamala’!
Email: kamalabalachandran199@gmail.com