The scent of the translucent brown pears soap…
The sweetness of pal koa (milk koa), from srivilliputhur…
The raw smell of hand grounded marudhani (mehendi)…
A big wooden cupboard, with soft cotton sarees…
An old white ambassador car…
And the cozy confines of an old house nestled in a colony that was more forest than even an actual forest…
Born in a small town on the southern part of Tamil Nadu, 23 years before the country got independence…
The Judge’s wife, was what summers were all about for well over half of my life…
Evening drives to the beach… Weekly visits to the library… Rainy nights spent huddled together on the bed… The oil massages to our heads and the failed attempts at trying to tame our wild curly hair…
The dogged belief in a higher power that the lady had, took us to every place of faith that she had access to…
The visits to Santhome Church and the pain relieving “Matha Ennai” (Mother Mary’s Oil) from Velankanni…
The trips to the Triplicane Mosque, for the boondi and blessings from the kind imam…
The evening drives to Mylapore for the Kapali temple and the Kantha Shashti she always read…
She went all out… And her influence endures…
Her unshakeable trust and belief on Shiva’s second son, till date is the only way I can control my motion sickness whenever I climb a hill… By chanting his name and patting my chest, the way she used to…
Memories that seem like flashes, but of a person who impacted my life more deeply than I realize…
The grand old lady of the family and unarguably the strongest person I had met in my life, with a will and vitality for life no one I had met came close to…
Some where when you look back… There are patterns to the way life rolls and both the judge, and his wife, seperated by more than twenty years, ended up telling me the same thing, the last time I met them…
And with that she went back to the judge she chose, 76 years ago, in a small town on the south of Madras, as India was getting ready to awaken to life and freedom…
My Discovery of India 