a stamp of validation

Call it security, adjustment, peaceful co-existence or subjugation. A modern day observer, with a heightened sense of rights, would see her only as having been a rubber stamp wife, a puppet mother and a remote grandmother. Life had just whizzed past without her making even a dent on it. Which modern girl would accept so much insignificance?
It was not as if She was bereft of individuality in thoughts or feelings. A lady of high sensitiveness, arresting impartiality and a keen artistic sense, She could have gone places if only…so many ifs had punctuated-and punctured her 90 years of existence. They had crept into her insidiously, occupied her thoughts and shaped her the way she was.
If only her mother had not died in her childhood, if only her father had cared to recognize her talents and educate her, if only like She had had a chance to nurture a nuclear family, if only She had known that exclusive maternal bonding born from a daughter’s 6th standard project work or from helping her son set up his home….if only She had had to juggle with numbers and struggle with a shoe string budget…others had hijacked what should have been her rights, privileges and problems. Her marriage to her cousin had been decided when She was born; her children grew up in the bountiful affection of aunts and uncles, got their values from grandma and their allowances from dad; why…She seemed to have never even put together a full fledged menu for the family till date. So many missed shots.
It could be a remarkable thing that she and her husband had remained literally unseparated for over half a century but it was not due to an overwhelming love, She thought in her more cynical moments. It was simply because She didn’t have another home she could call hers, a mother she could turn to in distress. Sharing whatever there was with a dozen others is only what life had taught her and reinforced time and again. True, She never once had to lock the front door at night or worry all alone over a feverish child. Nor did She know who had saved and how much. Did it matter? At times it simply stood out like a sore thumb.
Sitting by her window, staring into the starlit night, She mused…at least the full moon had remained the same. She had shared her love of nature with the grandchildren, when they came over. The first warm rays of the sun coming across the huge tree before the house had always freshened up her mind and brought back equilibrium. The soft sheen of new leaves, the cool wintry breeze and the chirping birds had unfailingly enthralled her and had sustained her through the vicissitudes of life. At least that. Till now.
A biggish cloud eclipsed the moon momentarily; her thoughts too got fuzzy. Her grandchildren diminished in size-She could hear the little girl’s shrill outburst of joy and She could feel the little hands of her grandson on her own…they had loved her with childish open mindedness. With her keen memory for small details, She hummed the song the children used to sing-how long ago was that? No idea…Time and memory were playing tricks on her….forgetting what She ate, who was with her in her house, remembering how mean a certain someone had been decades ago, preserving a torn scarf gifted by her daughter decades ago, laughing aloud at a joke She ascribed to her husband.
Her life went by in segments in her mind-often in chronological disorder. They gave away the lovely German Shepherd just because he bit a little girl. Did someone think how I missed him? My mother had hit me so hard because at 10 I could not handle a hot vessel. The second daughter should have finished her PhD; they had got her married just because an IAS boy had come along. I tried so hard to stall it. No one bothers to take the three year old to a park. All are busy. The first daughter is for ever buying new saris and giving away feverishly. Who has she taken after? What will become of her?

She had left different marks on different people-let us say She was the kind who didn’t leave people indifferent. Unconventional in her beliefs, aware of her individuality…in her heydays She had been a tough taskmaster-at least in words, for others always vetoed the decisions. Her own childhood of poverty evoked an extreme reaction of preservation in her. The servants muttered things about her stinginess and her strangeness. She weighed each bonus for them against the number of cobwebs She could spot, each request for leave against the number of neglected corners of the big house. Her house, her world, at times a fortress commandeered by others, at times a house of cards stacked on her impractical ideals. What was generosity for others was suspect to her: ‘give on merit’ was her credo; She had scales and units of her own. With an innate sense of right and wrong, however judgmental it was judged, She would voice a clear opinion at the evening tea-biscuit session while others groped around a topic. The younger generation admired her thinking and her ability to express it. However, nothing had translated into practical wisdom as her needs had been decided and taken care of by others. It had been discussed often how helpless She would be if She had to fend for herself some day…feigning deafness She had taken it all in.
As luck would have it, here She was, a rich stranded widow, with limited physical capacity, a life of dependency and monotony. The world waited with bated breath to see who would volunteer to take charge of this square peg in a round hole. And stunning everyone She had decided she would just go on living in this home, with whoever cared to take care of her. Her first concrete decision in life. A distant, needy cousin had moved in.
Suddenly She recalled a quote of Bill Gates, which her husband had once shared with her.
The biggest power of money is the power to give it away.
Money, give away?? She had shrieked that day. A profound sense of insecurity had made her paranoid. She had had visions of currency notes flying away into space, leaving her once more stranded in stark poverty.
Gates came back to her in her loneliness this full moon night. Something moved within her, like the readiness to press the nuclear button. While others had directed her life, She had held on to imaginary purse strings with a vicious grip. Today, She was ready. She made neat mental packets of wads of money, her money, and willed them away to her indifferent, grouchy care givers, for the care they had indeed taken of her. No calculations.
Had she indeed pressed the nuclear button? What was all this going up in a mushroom cloud? She felt an unknown lightness of soul and body. God! Even Gates would not have known THIS to be the power of money! That giving was also giving away, giving up, giving in: material burdens, tightly hoisted grudges, carefully nurtured self pity …all defences crumbled, all scores settled with all: cobwebs, father, injustice, isolation… Simply. It was a blanket pardon to life’s quirkiness.
Her life at last got the stamp of validation long overdue and She sank into a peace filled sleep.