A photo of my mom that she never saw

It was smaller and had a linen cover with flowers embroidered along the right.

One of my mother’s albums was different from the rest. It was smaller and had a linen cover with flowers embroidered along the right. On the very first page was the photograph of a smiling young couple. A line beneath it read, “Don’t forget Vienna and your friends Maria and Karl”.

I asked my mother who they were and was told she had lived in their house as a boarder when she was finishing her medical training in Vienna during the 1930s. Vienna of those days was famous for its three Ms…music, medicine and maidens! It was but natural, then, for my mother to stay there and work under its famous physicians before returning to India after successfully qualifying for an MRCP from London.

Forty years later, while on a holiday in Europe, we visited Vienna. We saw the Schonbrunn Palace, visited what had once been the Vienna Woods and listened to Strauss waltzes played by an orchestra while sipping coffee under the afternoon sun in a park. My mother wanted to visit the house she had lived in. She remembered the address on Kartner Ring and both of us set out to locate it.

We walked up and down the RingStrasse, of which Kartner Ring was a section, while she looked for familiar landmarks, but with no success. Finally, we found a person who could speak English. Upon enquiry, he smiled and asked her when she had last visited Vienna. 1937, she said. He threw up his arms and then sat on the sidewalk, holding his head, then looked up and said, “Madam, you forget that there was a war. What you see here now is what has been rebuilt. Bombs flattened everything.”

Memories of my mother’s Viennese sojourn gradually faded away, when out of the blue, my sister-in-law sent me a picture recently of a group photo of the American Medical Association of Vienna, taken in 1937. There, among the men in their winter clothing, stood a tiny figure, draped in a saree… my mother, the only woman in that gathering. A rose among the thorns, as a cousin described her.

Eighty-three years after the picture was taken, it came back to us via a cousin’s son, who was given it by his father-in-law’s friend, whose father was also in the picture. Had the photo been taken digitally as it is now, would it have been saved to surface after so long? Memories of my mother’s life came flooding back when I saw the image of her that she never saw.

Lakshmi Rajagopalan
Email: rajagopalan.lakshmi@gmail.com

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