Daadi

WARNING: LONG POST! PHOTOS WON'T UPLOAD!

I'd like to take a moment to recognize a primary contributor to my not jumping off the deep end - or even suffering malnutrition while working my butt off: My mother-in-law.

Daadi has led a long, and at times very hard, life. Yet she continues to amaze me with her love - for my son, for me, Yogesh, my parents, sister, our families & friends - for our Nanny, little Noah (our share-care infant partner), our cat, Mr. Idea, and even our housecleaner, Mrs. Ho.

ABOUT DAADI

She is the most photo-sensitive person I have ever met. If it's sunny outside, it's warm, and she is happy. If it's foggy, rainy, or grey-skies, it's "COOOLD" and she's just patiently holding out for better weather - regardless of the actual temperature. She won't use plain-cotton sheets on her bed if they're too 'slippery' - because they're "COOOLD" - she'd prefer the scratchy low-thread-count ones she's used to, because they're not cold. Fluffy blankets aren't useful - only woolen ones (or polyester that feels as scratchy as wool) are really "warm" - that, and fleece. She considers polarfleece a gift to modern-day COOOOLD climates like ours. :)

She doesn't complain. Or, she doesn't about things that I would complain about, and the complaints she does have are things we can manage. If we're walking too fast, no complaints - she'll catch up. If we want to leave a party too soon - not a word. She will protest when we want to take her places - sometimes it hurts to move at her age, I guess.

We have 1 bathroom in our home - and she's not young...but she'll let Yogesh and I have 1st-go at the bathroom in the mornings. She doesn't expect me to cook. Or clean. She will, as a matter of course, starve herself if she thinks I, Yogesh, or of course Deven, are not eating enough (but we'd never know if she was hungry!). She only needs full-fat real Half-and-Half for her tea, as far as I can tell. She worries - ENDLESSLY - about Deven in particular - but even every time I'm late from work; every time Yogesh is up too late - she's concerned.

She has all sorts of home-remedies for things (and EVERY problem is caused by ...what? You got it! "COOOLD" (Karen - if you're reading this I know you'll agree!) While some remedies seem outlandish, some aren't 1/2 bad - like the honey in tea when you're ill. :)

She loves to garden; and since our garden is 4 treacherous flights of steps downstairs, she putters about out back on our back stairs with potted plants, for hours. She insists on washing her own clothing because the washing machine doesn't get clothing as clean; and she even does most of her own dishes unless we catch her(though we've convinced her...sort of...that baby bottles can go in the dishwasher).

Remember I mentioned our housecleaner? Mrs. Ho is a Chinese lady who speaks ~ 3 words of English (not an exaduration); and Daadi speaks ~ 300 English words. Yet, somehow Daadi knows that Mrs. Ho is a grandmother, with 3 grandkids, aged 5, 3, 2, nearby - and she is happy to see Mrs. Ho every-other Friday. I can barely figure out how to pay Mrs. Ho correctly - and Daadi got all that? Pretty impressive.

She has nightmares sometimes. It makes me sad to hear her crying out in her sleep - she's reliving some trauma of the past. It's something she does more often on nights when she's had an emotional conversation or has bickered with someone she cares for. Occasionally we'll catch her acting irrationally - hoarding food, insisting we not throw away used newsprint - and all hell will break loose if we try to toss the not-quite-fully-grease-covered junk mail.

She has no teeth of her own - and her dentures hurt, but she flatly refuses to get new ones because the ones she has are good enough (e.g. they're not completely broken). She has new glasses, only because we told her that my insurance would pay for new glasses - FREE - a few years back (the glasses were ~ $10 in India; she chose them specifically because they were cheap). She is stooped over, and not in perfect health. Nothing horribly wrong - but her 72 years haven't been easy.

She knows the value of everything...AND the price. When she first arrived here, her eyes bugged-out at the Farmer's Market when she heard how expensive vegetables were in the U.S. But, she quickly made friends with Kuo, the Vietnamese vegetable-man - so now he almost always comps us a few pounds worth of onions or potatoes, I'm sure in part because she grins from ear-to-ear when she visits his stand. She's cooked some of her world-famous okra for him - and we are some of his best customers.

Which brings me to her culinary skills. I married Yogesh, and thought I'd gotten a good deal with a husband who loves to cook. Then his mom moved in, and I realized I must've been very, very good in a prior life - because wow can she cook! Give her a vegetable (or 3 or 5 or 15) and a standard Indian spice pot, and wow. She insists on cooking fresh, piping-hot rotis, chapatis, and breads for us - something Yogesh and I still find uncomfortable to have her cooking while we eat - but she insists it is her pleasure to cook for us...so who am I to complain?

She admonishes Yogesh when we argue. Though she may not catch the whole gist of a conversation; she'll get 80% of it - and she knows that most arguements between Yogesh and I are HIS fault. :-) She can read & write Hindi, and speaks halting English, but understands most of it, and is just embarassed when she can't be understood.

She goes to bed early because she considers it her job to manage the household - particularly the small, crawling rascal who rules our roost. It starts daily ~ 5:00 a.m., when he awakens, and they get uninterrupted "Daadi time" together until ~ 7:00 a.m. when we awake. When she sees him, her whole face lights up and she loses ~ 10 years - she makes this cute little "Ah-haaah" sound, and smiles and smiles and smiles. This, of course, puts an ear-to-ear grin on his face, and he immediately brings his fat little hands to his mouth and wriggles with excitement at being recognized. (Deven, naturally, thinks it's normal already to be waited on hand-and-foot; so he's going to have something comin' to him once he starts dating...but that's a story for another post).

I think what makes me happiest, in a way I never could've imagined, is watching Daadi & Pota (grandson- that's Deven) interact. She loves this child more than anythign else - she misses him when they're apart; she thinks of him constantly - what would he like? What makes him giggle? - She knits for him, and cooks for me because I (was) feed(ing) her grandson...my only 1/2-joking comment had been that I was going to breastfeed until he's 10, because she feeds me so well. ;-)

SOME FACTS
Daadi was born Savitri Sharma, on July 8, 1935, in Ajmer, Rajasthan. Her parents were a "love marriage" - something that was relatively unusual in British India - most Indians were (and still are) entered into arranged marriages by their families. (Whether her parents fell in love after marriage, as many arranged-married couples do, is a mystery - either way, they loved each other deeply).

Her mother, Bhagwati Sharma, passed away when she was 5 from pneumonia, and her father, Chunnilal Sharma, passed away when she was 7, of a broken heart. She barely remembers her parents, mostly remembers her feelings about their loss, which I suppose is natural for any little girl of 5 or 7 years old in that situation.

She was raised by her paternal grandparents (her Daada & Daadi). Her Daada was a medicine-man - not a doctor by today's medical definition, but an ayurvedic healer; and her Daadi was, naturally, a working (grand)mother.

Daadi went to school through the 8th grade. Sometime in her final year in school (~1950), her science teacher told her that someday there would be a way for us to 'harness the sun' and turn sunlight into electricity that could power lightbulbs and refrigerators. She's commented to me that she is happy to live with a daughter-in-law (bahu - that's me!) who now sells 'solar.' Her grandparents were relatively well-to-do, and despite being an orphan, she led a good childhood.

Her grandparents wanted to see her married before they got too old, so on April 20, 1950, she married then 18-year old Om Prakash (O.P.) Sharma - my father in law. He was (is) the oldest of 6, and was introduced to her family through distant relatives (her surname was Sharma before marriage as well; but there's no blood relation). As was the custom, she moved in with his family.

They moved to a tiny 2-room flat in Roop Nagar soon after they were married (see map, scroll in near the bottom at the corner of "Grand Trunk Road" - 1 block north of that is where their tiny flat was):

View Larger Map

OP Sharma, as the oldest son whose father passed away early, had the responsibility for putting his siblings through school; so she, naturally, had responsibility for managing the whole raucous household - including cooking 3+ meals per day, buying the food, cleaning (maybe that wasn't so hard - the whole place was less than 500 square feet - with a communal bathroom shared with others down the hall). Naah, it wasn't easy!

The family included ~ 8-12 people at any one time:
- Her mother-in-law (reportedly a "very strong and physically imposing woman" - I take this to mean "difficult" from the stories I've heard)
- Her husband's old-maiden aunt, Yeshumati Devi, who Yogesh later called Mataji
- 3 younger brothers & 2 younger sisters, and their associated friends, spouses, and sundry people until they all moved away - the brothers to Canada or the U.S., and the sisters to husbands in Chandigargh & rural Haryana, respectively
- Yogesh's brother & sister, when they came along
- Friends, artists, and visitors from every corner of the globe

This may not have been so difficult, except they had *extremely* modest means at that time - Daada was determined to be an artist, and as most artists, suffered mightily before he - and they - were well-to-do.

Yogesh's older brother Sanjay was born Tikkum Chand Sharma, on October 2, 1956. His sister Mukta was born 7 years later in 1963, and for those years, they were by any standards, "severely financially constrained" (that's Yogesh's term). Throughout this whole time, Daadi's responsibility was the household: Managing too many people with too little space, money, and time to make life anything like what we live today.

In 1981, when Yogesh was 10, the family moved into a much better home - government housing (because Daada was Principal of the Delhi College of Art) at 33 Rajpur Road:

View Larger Map

While Daadi was pleased with the new home, she's commented wistfully that she missed her friends when she moved. They lived on Rajpur Road for 10 years, and Daada steadily did better in his art as well as at his Principal posting. Yogesh was the first to attend private school (confusingly to us Americans, called "Public School" - though if you check the links, you'll see it's most certainly posh-private), at the nearby St. Xavier's School. In 1991, the family moved again to their current home, which Daada designed, at 49 Vikas Marg (scroll in, right above the Mother Theresa School to see their block):

View Larger Map

She has led a quiet existence, putting up with a lot of grief from others and rarely complaining. She isn't in perfect health - she stoops over when she walks, and doesn't exercise enough - getting up and down our 33 stairs is enough for her. I don't know what the future holds, but she is part of it for us - we are thinking of all sorts of things to make her life comfortable and meaningful now (all we have to do is let her spend time with Deven, I think!) I only hope Deven and she spend enough time together for him to remember her, like I remember my own Daadi (Nunu), when HE is a parent & grandparent.