“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my mother.”
-Abraham Lincoln
It’s the start of the ‘weekend’, so often used in American culture as though something interesting is bound to happen during that time period. I honestly feel we are so fascinated by the idea of having fun during the weekend that we forget there are weekdays too. All over the news weathermen are talking about this giant snow storm that is going to hit the Midwest over the weekend. There are gloomy talks of how this one is going to be a ‘stay at home’ weekend because of it. As if that’s a bad thing.
As a young girl who has spent most part of her life in a town called Guwahati, in north east India, these things amuse me. As a child, I remember 2 distinct weather-related phenomena growing up in a small corner of Dispur, the capital of my home state Assam. The incessant rains and the consistent earthquakes. The strange thing though is while one required you to stay indoors for safety and the other outdoors, I preferred the other way around. Whenever we used to have those rains accompanied by thunder and lightning, I remember screaming to get out of the house. You see we live (or still live) in an “Assam type” house with aluminium roofs which are designed to drain away the rain, which was more than half the year for us. As a child, I never understood their function and the only thing that bothered me was the startling sound they would make while heavy drops of rain poured over them. It felt like vicious monsters were growling at us and demanding us to leave that particular house. Of course, I could never explain that to my parents who thought I was just being ingenuous.
Today, I live near the ‘windy city’ of America where the wind gusts are very high making the same fierce growling sounds I used to hear as a child, and invariably I get scared, just like I used to beforein Guwahati. I share my distress with my husband who understands but still thinks its immature to be afraid of the mere sound of wind. Deep down I feel a sense of familiarity with these sounds. It feels like I have known them forever. I go to a point where I contemplate they have come all the way from my home to visit me. Although both the cities are almost 8000 miles apart, I tend to connect them more often than not through thoughts like these. That is what we humans do. We try to keep pieces of significant memories alive through more ways than one, through pictures, sometimes real ones and other times mental ones.
Coming back to the snow, the weather in Guwahati is subtropical, mostly humid. I tend to believe that the weather was more moderate in the 90s and early 2000s, when I was growing up. But I do remember the summers and mostly because of the ‘Fridge’ a short form for Refrigerator. Let me elaborate.
I was born in Nalbari, a town in lower Assam from where my parents originally belong. They moved to Guwahati right after I was born. However, as a baby I suffered from pneumonia. It was the worst kind and I remember my mother telling me this story about her bus trip from village to town. I was on her lap and I was asleep. Turns out, I woke up with the worst cough a baby can wake up with. My mother immediately realised something was terribly wrong and she tells me she thought I was going to die of the coughing and breathlessness. It was then she ran to a hospital nearby named PolyClinic, a well-known nursing home in Guwahati. She literally barged into the hospital and screamed to get attention. Turns out, a well-known doctor attended to me and did the best he could, and true to his fame, I was alive and well, back to full recovery after months of treatment. The reason I am telling this is he mentioned something to my mom while seeing her the last time she took me to him. He said, I could never be exposed to very cold temperatures or eat anything too cold. I didn’t understand the extent to which it would affect me until I turned into a full-grown child.
You see Guwahati doesn’t get that cold so the weather wasn’t really a problem for her. My mother, being as she is, took extreme care in protecting me from eating anything cold which meant we couldn’t have a fridge in the house until I was living in it. Needless to say, my two older brothers were furious at that time because having a fridge was sort of a status symbol around that time. Not that we were very rich but it would have been nice to let people believe that we were by having one.
By the time I was 10, I began to discover a category of food that I wasn’t supposed to have that all that all kids my age were relishing. They were these delicious looking bars that came in different colours and my mouth watered every time I saw someone having one. That is where my fascination with ice cream gained momentum. That summer we were watching a movie at one of the neighbour’s when I noticed my friend going to get cold water from the fridge. That’s when I saw a fridge from inside for the very first time. It seemed like a whole different world to me. The vegetables and fruits my mom normally kept in an open basket on the floor of her kitchen, were kept neatly inside in compartments. It felt like my mom’s kitchen is rustic and the fridge is classy.
The tidiness of the fridge made foods that I normally hate look delightful. Sure I can have bottle
gourd if you get it from inside this fridge looking fresh and feeling cold. My happiness soared when my friend showed me the ice trays. There it was. In a small compartmentalised tray that contained small, transparent blocks of ice! It literally gave me chills. I asked her if I could have one. She told me you don’t actually eat the ice cubes but I wasn’t leaving until she let me have one. Of course, that night I had a fever. It was worth it and my dear mother never found out!
Time and again we tried to convince our parents that fridge was becoming a necessity as it got
warmer in Guwahati. But they wouldn’t heed. The fact that people would often mistake our well
water to be fridge water didn’t help at all. One summer, there was this lady who came to see my mom and explicitly asked for a glass of fridge water, which I thought would surely embarrass my mom. But instead, she was quiet and got her well water and the lady never once complained. How stupid you have to be to not know the difference? Later I found out that the lady wasn’t a fool after all. You see well water is magic. It feels cold in summer and warm in winters which meant we didn’t need a fridge and no amount of people asking for fridge water could bring down my mother’s resolve of keeping me off cold food.
Today, I got a call from her and she was furious at me for letting myself and my daughter play in the snow from a video I sent her last week. She might have just seen it today. You know how the old folks are with technology. I tried to explain to her that she was wearing snow suit, boots and all other necessary precautions (read: expensive stuff you buy to let your children play in the snow). And I myself was wearing a decent winter jacket. But she wouldn’t listen.
When I told her I havedecided to go and stay in the US, her first question was “is it too cold there”. I couldn’t lie to her but told her its manageable. It is not actually. Not in the area where I live. There are days when the low gets to -25 degrees and you can’t stay out for more than a minute. I don’t need to tell her that,although I know she knows it deep down and also, she follows international news a lot these days.
She kept telling me not to go out of the house for anything other than an emergency. She gets mad at me when she sees me wearing a T shirt inside the house. I have tried to explain to her that people here are used to doing their jobs in the cold. Further, the rooms are centrally heated so you can manage in a T shirt. To that she replies that people may be used to it, but I am not. I come from a place where it doesn’t get too cold, where eating an ice cube gave me a fever (I guess she did find out about that), where she didn’t allow a fridge in the house until I left for college, where a little bit of cold could hurt me and she would be there to take care of me. As I listen to her, my eyes start to dampen and voice begin to choke. But I get myself together and tell her I can take care of myself and my daughter. I am not a child anymore. Although I was weeping like one while telling her that. But she doesn’t know that.
As I keep the phone away, I turn towards the huge fridge we have in our apartment. It doesn’t seem significant anymore. Sure it holds a lot of food, beverages and frozen stuff. But it is nothing like the fridge that was thousand of miles away from here back home in Guwahati. That fridge represents the love and care my mother had for me. It represented all the extra planning she had to do to keep her leftovers fresh, to keep the vegetables and fruits fresh when it started getting really hot. It represents the extent to which our parents go to protect us from what they think might harm us.
I look at my fridge and see the pictures of my daughter from school. For the Western people, fridge is generally the place to put pictures and notes for the family. I have started to become one by embracing this tradition. But in my heart, I want to become like my mother who would go above and beyond just so her daughter wouldn’t catch a cold.
Suddenly I remember a line from my favourite Harry Potter series “Love as powerful as your
mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign..to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”
And I think no amount of cold can get me sick anymore, ever. I begin preparing for the snowstorm tomorrow.