JUST how did she do it? It is a question that is often on my mind.
It has been playing on my mind even more all of this week.
Compared to what my mother went through, I only had to deal with minor irritants such as the flu and gastroentritis and its attendant woes. As my body whirled in pain, my son's stomach did too. It turned out to be a seemingly endless round of doctors and medicines.
It lasted just a week, yet it felt like long days and seemingly endless nights.
There were several times during the week, when I felt overwhelmed and hoped the dawn would arrive with the promise of good health for my son.
Each time, in my seemingly finite space, when I felt the world was closing in on me, all I did was shut my eyes and spent a few moments thinking of my mother. This is something I often do, when I am feeling low.
There is something about mothers and the role they play in their children's lives, which often goes unacknowledged. The fact that they tend to under-state all that they accomplish in a day does not help.
I remember an interview I did with Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. A question about his late mother got him all emotional and we spoke for the next hour.
He said he missed her greatly not because he is successful. "I miss her because she would have loved me even if I was a failure," he said.
Yes, mothers have that power of being everything for their children.
When the double whammy of arthritis and breast cancer struck her, my mother was just 28-years-old. She had two very young children, my younger sister and I. My father, an Indian Army officer was posted in Rajouri, in the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was a place where soldiers were not allowed to take their families. The altitude, the terrain, the temperature and the political situation, all came into play. So we had to stay back in Dehra Dun, while my father did his two-year stint there.
The day my mother found out the truth about the pain that had been crippling her occasionally, she was alone.
The year was 1976. Cancer was still a dreaded disease and as my father would tell us years later, the doctors did not give her much hope.
But my mother was a fighter.
She ran the house single-handedly, without any full time help. She had a day job as a school teacher and she loved to paint. In the evenings after our homework was done and dinner was served, she would retreat into one of the rooms which doubled up as her studio.
The canvases, oils, brushes, turpentine, all combined to energise her and she would paint for at least two hours every night before she went to bed. Those were days when funding for the arts was virtually unheard of.
So she would organise an annual solo show, which was always a sell-out. In fact, what we are left with are several of her unfinished canvases.
On weekends, several young students flitted in and out of our home attending art classes offered by her. She had never officially studied art, yet she had created a loyal following in days well before the arrival of the internet and all the attendant social media platforms.
One of her oils on canvas and ten thousand rupees was all it took for my father to buy the land he built his house on.
Even when she was in intense pain, she never showed it. When she had to snip off her long, lustrous hair, we cried. It was too beautiful to let go. She remained calm, telling us, it is only hair, it would grow back.
My mother never once talked about her illness. For as long as she could, she moved around and kept her routine and ours as normal as possible. On the last holiday we took as a family, she took us to the heritage site of Ajanta and Ellora caves in western Maharastra state.
She had to use a walking stick to get past the steps. I cannot even imagine the pain she was in, yet she ensured our last holiday memory of her, was filled with smiles.
She mutli-tasked years before the term was invented and never made a big deal out of it, just like a lot of mothers in her time. All our meals were home-cooked, we ate out only once every month. On birthdays every single dish on the table would be straight out of her kitchen.
The month before she fell very sick, she baked four birthday cakes for my sister because she felt on that day nothing was 'rising right.'
My sister and I only got whiff of her critical illness, the day she was bed-ridden. November 8, 1980 marked the beginning of our worst winter.
My mother was confined to her bed. She hated it.
It was on that day that she changed. She kept urging her many friends not to visit her. At that time we could not understand. After all, our house had always been open to people.
Now, when I look back I comprehend fully. She did not want people to see the helpless side of her.
Even as she lay dying, she moaned not about the pain rather the birthday cake she could not bake for me.
When my fingers swelled, as they always did in the winter months, she made sure I had the hot water ready before she got her rubber bottle filled with hot water.
Each time I think of her, the rush of memories leads to a flurry of tears.
My mother died on Feb 8, 1981. I was barely 12. I never knew I would be a mother some day and that I would need my own emotional crutch to lean on.
Through her exemplary life, she ensured she could always be present in her absence. Just like mothers everywhere.