April 15 – 30, 2004

By Sathya Saran

LAST week, I ran into an old friend. I was aghast at what she had made of herself. When I had last seen her, she had been a young, slim, pretty young thing, very earnest in whatever she did. She had about her then, an air of being someone who was very much her own person, walking the path of life a little apart from the crowd and yet interacting with it when the need arose.

SHE worked in a bank, and was admired for her integrity, her efficiency and her demure demeanour. I lost touch with her when she got married. We used to earlier meet only occasionally, so I did not miss seeing her.

I HEARD that she had given up her job, when, after a troublesome pregnancy, she became the mother of a bonny boy.

THE thought crossed my mind when I heard this is that the bank had lost one of its best employees. I wondered why she had decided to be a full time mom; I personally believe that support systems can be set up by anyone, and any woman could be a loving, efficient working mother if she so chooses.

BUT I kept my counsel, knowing that many women do find the guilt of leaving a baby at home too strong to let them continue with their work. I wished her well in my mind, and knew that she would do a brilliant job of bringing up her child to be as dependable and sincere an adult as she herself was.

YEARS passed, and then last week, I ran into her quite by accident. As I said before, I was aghast at her appearance. Always slim, she now looked thin, frail and weak. Her hair had become frizzy and greyed considerably, and her skin, once luminous, had turned dull and dry and I could see lines that were far beyond what was natural for someone in her early 40s.

I COULD not help asking her if she was ill. I must have sounded very rude, but she smiled back and said, she was as well as she had always been... then, seeing the look in my eyes, she laughed guiltily and said, yes I know, I look a wreck. She must have read my mind and seen in it the question about whether her marriage was the cause of her looks. It wasn't, she hastened to assure me; all was well, and she had a loving family. It was just her way of totally immersing herself in everything that she did that led to her neglect of self.

THUS it was that she had spent the last eight years looking after her child, he was the sun around which her life revolved; there was little time for anything else. She had not wanted any outside help, and tended him through the nights of baby fevers, and days of wonderful learning; she heard his first chuckle, his first word, taught him to stand on his unsteady legs for the first time, and held him when he fell. In short, she was a full-time mum, and loving every minute of it.

WHAT I could not understand was the fact that she had to take last place in the priorities in her life. I told her that this was a mille-nnium where even the unlettered knew that they had to fend for themselves, and no one else would really care for a woman if she did not care for herself, and she agreed with me...

I LEFT her with the desire to invest a bit of her care in herself, but I wondered if the habit of years would fall off so easily. And if at the end of it all, it was worth it...

AFTER all, Nature teaches us that our young are not our own, and when we negate self to bring up children, do we not then grow expectations from them that defy the laws of Nature?

IT was a thought that stayed with me for a long time... and left me with no real answer.