Lalit Gupta
lalitguptajammu@gmail.com
With my mother’s passing in 1984, I lost not only her sandalwood-scented presence; convivial, self-assured, light on her toes, her eyes forever caressing, but an entire universe that had quietly revolved around her. With her went the rituals, the customs, the cherished dishes, and the thousand unnoticed details that had once stitched our days together. What had seemed permanent dissolved slowly, like incense thinning into air.
In 1959, when I was six, my eldest brother was commissioned into the Kumaon Regiment of the Indian Army. The news moved through our clan and biradari like a festive drumbeat. My father, then a mahaldar at the Octroi Post at the Canal Head, Jammu, carried himself differently after that day. Pride did not announce itself loudly; it settled into his shoulders, sharpened his posture, and softened his speech. Honour entered our home not as spectacle, but as glow-in-the-moist shine of his eyes, in the firm handshakes of neighbours, in the hushed repetition of the word “fauj.”
It was around this time that the ritual fixed itself in my memory.
Whenever my brother prepared to leave after his annual or short stays, my mother would summon my sister to the doorway. In her hands she would hold a brass gadva/lota filled with water. My brother, uniformed and upright, would pause at the doorway and drop a coin into it before stepping out. The gesture was simple, almost casual-but it carried a mother’s unspoken negotiations with destiny: protection from the evil eye, safe passage through distant terrains, and a swift return home.
In December 1961, when Operation Vijay liberated Goa, Daman, and Diu from centuries of Portuguese rule, my brother’s participation filled our house with jubilation. War, from a distance, arrived wrapped in national pride.
Earlier generations of Dogra soldiers had returned home from the World Wars and from UN service in the Congo bearing transistors and other curiosities of a changing world. My brother came back from Goa with crates of Martini whiskey in units of twin bottles nestled in handsome straw packaging. They seemed to us like artefacts from another civilisation, carrying the fragrance of elsewhere.
But 1962 stripped romance from soldiering. The Chinese aggression led to my newly married brother being posted as a captain to the frontier ranges of Chushul in Ladakh. The mountains, at more than 14,000 feet, were merciless. When he returned after the brief but brutal war, his face had darkened sharply from the cold and glare; a “mountain face,” the doctors said. My mother, unprepared for the transformation, fainted at the sight of him. It was perhaps her first encounter with the cost that pride extracts.
In 1965, my other elder brother, a postgraduate in Mathematics, refused the predictability of a teacher’s desk and quietly chose the uniform instead. When he cleared the Short Service Commission, our household absorbed the news with a mixture of disbelief and admiration. Soon, a framed photograph of the two brothers, Captain and Lieutenant, occupied pride of place on the facing wall of the andar-aali baithak of our rented house in Panjtirthi. They looked impossibly young, as if war were merely another examination to be passed.
The crates of Martini were eventually shifted to the miani of our newly built house in Gandhi Nagar. Between 1969-70, in the foolish bravado of youth, friends and I quietly liberated those bottles from their long storage. They were consumed in secret picnics at Gullu da Bada and along the khads that fed the river Tawi from the Mahamaya hillside. It felt then like rebellion; today it feels like a footnote in the many shenanigans of that heady season of youth.
The 1971 war was different. By then, my brothers were Major and Captain, posted in Dhaka and Kohima. Each of those thirteen days of war pressed upon our household like a held breath. We lived by the radio, its crackle our only bridge to distant battlefields. My mother’s eyes, however, remained steady. The ritual at departure had been performed; in her faith, that counted for something.
The war ended with victory and the birth of Bangladesh. Relief swept through us, but the ritual did not change. Even after my sister’s marriage, a young kanjak from a neighbouring house would be brought to stand at the door with the water-filled pot. Some gestures, once sanctified, resist erosion.
Time, however, alters everything else.
My brothers rose in rank. Their families joined them at various postings. Our conversations on the landline shifted from terrain and troop movements to children’s schools and domestic inconveniences. Their visits home grew shorter, then fewer. The axis of gathering subtly shifted; we were invited outward instead.
I left for Baroda to study, returned in 1979, and joined the Fine Arts Institute. My younger brother entered the business of wholesale medicines. Gradually, we became the household’s continuity while the soldiers belonged more to the nation than to the home.
Then, in 1984, when both of us younger brothers were married, our deeply Sanatani mother fell ill. A gallbladder infection, the doctors said, perhaps aggravated by one fast too many. Further tests revealed malignancy. The woman who had negotiated with fate at the doorway could not negotiate with this. Within months, she was gone.
Her absence announced itself not in drama but in small fractures, hollows. My father, once so erect in bearing, wept quietly during pooja. Visits from siblings became less frequent, their own responsibilities multiplying. And most piercing of all, there was no longer a young maiden standing at the threshold with a gadva of water. No coin breaking the surface with a soft metallic sound. No mother standing guard between departure and return. The purna-kumbha waited in memory alone.
When my father passed away three years later, it felt as though the ancestral centre had collapsed. Today, we two younger brothers dwell in the old house. Our elder siblings live within the orbit of their own expanding families. The mobile phone connects us efficiently, faithfully, but without fragrance.
What remains most vivid to me is that doorway/threshold.
I still see my mother there, eyes fixed on the lane long before the expected hour of arrival. I still hear the faint chime of a coin touching water: A small metallic assurance against vast uncertainties.
That ritual was more than a custom. It was her quiet sovereignty over fear. Her pride in her sons. Her conversation with forces she could not command but refused to surrender to.
Perhaps it was, in her own way, a continuation of an older Vedic practice carried not in scripture, but in the steady hands of a mother at her doorway.
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