Anoop Judge | Author · Writing Instructor · Former T.V. Host​

I brought you into this world, and I can take you out . . . My Indian Mother

The greatest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude – Thornton Wilder *

My mom was a force to be reckoned with when she was angry with my brother and I, a frequently-occurring event in our household. We often got into trouble . . . ‘just wait till we get home’ was an oft-repeated threat of hers. It happened right in the neighborhood supermarket called Super Big Bazaar. My brother and I got into a scrape over a bag of Cadbury’s chocolate eclairs. I pushed him, he pushed me back . . . smack-a-dab into a Haldiram’s can display. I went sprawling and so did the can of rasogullas, tumbling everywhere like the walls of an old haveli attacked by a bulldozer. I regained my upright position and disappeared into the shelves of food just as mom’s eyes went wide with horror, her lips thin with anger. “Just you wait, Missy,” she shouted at me, cuffing the back of my brother’s head who was not so quick to escape.

Mummy, Tell Me One More Story . . .

The greatest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude – Thornton Wilder *

Long before I became a storyteller, my mom used to tell us stories. Stories of a mighty king, and a sweet-faced queen who fell in love, who had a beautiful bonny girl, whose kingdom was invaded by marauding armies, by aliens, by vampires . . . stories that had me at age five, jumping up and down on the couch and asking with bated breath, “And, then what happened?” My mom gave me the gift of stories, and I honor her memory by writing them. (Read my latest published story here: http://moonmagazine.org/anoop-judge-fury-2019-05-04/ )

My mom was always stylish, elegant in the saris she wrapped around her lissome figure, and the tasteful jewelry that adorned her neck and ears—a string of pearls, tiny diamond studs, thin gold bangles on each of her wrists. Thumbing through old albums after she passed away, I come across a black-and-white picture of my mom and dad when they lived in Scotland for the first five years after their marriage. In it, my mom wears a cape with large, round buttons over a sari. Her hair is pulled back at the nape of her slender neck, her hands folded one over the other in her lap, while her eyes smile at the world in wonder.

I wasn\’t ready to let you go . . .

Two days before my mother passed, the temperature in Delhi— my hometown—was 104 degrees. Not a leaf stirred and the aerial roots of banyan trees in our backyard hung down limply, and languidly, immobile. The day my mother passed it was raining. A welcome healing rain that cooled the scorching, heat-baked earth. I saw poor children dancing in the street in joy, their upturned faces creased in smiles as their tongues mopped greedily at the raindrops. It was as if the heavens had opened their arms to welcome my mom into its embrace.

For ten days, my mom struggled for her life in the ICU—a sterile room with white walls, beeping machines, and a smell of Dettol antiseptic hanging in the air like the thick smog that blankets the congested streets of New Delhi in the wintertime.

Anoop Judge is a blogger and an author, who’s lived in the San Francisco-Bay Area for the past 27 years. As an Indian-American writer, her goal is to discuss the diaspora of Indian people in the context of twenty-first century America.