His Mother

ONLY THE TRUTH This is a true story of a boy from a South Indian village. He was nearly a year old when he lost his father. His thirty-year-old mother herself had a heart problem. Rigid custom made his widowed mother to have her head tonsured and wear a redbordered sandal colour sari, which also covered her head (like a nun). The boy had been going to a nondescript school in the village, which had classes only up to 1V Standard. He was to be admitted in the V Standard in high school. The only high school worth the name was in the town four kilometers away across the river, Cauvery. Those days, young widows dared not go out alone nor talk to men. Against these odds, ailing but strong willed, she vowed to put her son in the school. Crossing the river in a boat, (a round boat pushed along by boatmen with long poles) she walked the boy to the school. At the gate, she nudged the boy inside with the papers (birth certificates etc.). The Headmaster who saw the boy exclaimed, "Who is this urchin?" and queried, "What are you doing here?"The child quivered and babbled, tears welling up. When a woman who had happened to have spoken to the waiting widow outside the gate, explained, he began to soften and muttered "poor orphan". His kindness saw the kid admitted to the school. Loneliness, fright and his mother's poor health hampered the boy's progress and he fared badly in the first terminal exams The boy had often heard her mother, who had become bed-ridden before the exams commenced, pleading to the visiting doctor "Just for this child's sake please save me! Please help me live for a few more years at least". She was always proud of her son's "high intelligence". When the exam results came, the first thing she wanted to know was the boy's marks in maths. Her friends at her bedside who had already seen his marks-card cautioned the boy by gesticulations. Overlooking their signals the boy blurted out "Two (2%), Amma". A wry smile passed her wan face as she said, "I am proud of my son. He will never tell a lie". A few days later, she passed away. It was just before Diwali (festival of lights) in1939. The eight-year-old boy had been praying nights and days to The Lord Almighty to spare his dearest mother for some more years. He took a solemn vow never to swirve from the path of Truth. But, to the boy's unconsolable sorrow, she was suddenly taken away. He began to lose faith in God and began to question His very existence. Nevertheless, he could not explain away one phenomenon. That was, the regular appearances of his dear mother's vision not only almost every night but also during those times. when he faced some crisis or acute misery. Many may think it stupid, but the little orphan continued to believe implicitly that his mother's spirit was always guiding him and giving him courage. It was sometime during 1974 -75 when he stopped getting visions of his mother. He concluded that if God were to have answered his prayers and saved his mother's life, she would have perhaps lived up to 1974 that would be her 72nd year. He thought perhaps God had answered his prayers, in His own inscrutable way, by preserving her in astral shape till her 72nd year thereby saving her from all the troubles and travails she

might have had to face in this physical world.