My mother’s hum

We have come to Goa to remember mummy. In 2013 we had all been here. Mummy was quiet and content. The sand was too soft for her to walk on comfortably. The food was all overpriced, albeit delicious. We lived in a shack with four beds on a bare floor, the roof of thatch, the bathroom without a roof at all. Agonda Beach stretched out across the whole line of vision and the shacks stretched out on the other, face to face, and there was nothing to see but the ocean.

Mummy is a very particular lady and all these things were potentially things that could have disturbed her, especially the prices. They must have. The measure of her happiness was that she did not voice a single problem, difficulty or objection. The roll of the ocean was met by a hum of contentment from within her.

I recognised the hum well. It usually came on a holiday. In 1970 we drove around Europe in our Mercedes, daddy at the wheel, mummy navigating, Sunil and I at the back, at the beginning and end of our teen years. We went to France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Poland, twice. We spent many days each at Warsaw, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, Interlaken and Vienna. We all loved it. But mummy was the one who made the whole car hum.

The same hum was in the house when we would go to Mussoorie. Her bedroom and bathroom were set up impeccably, then were the dining room, drawing room, dormitory, other bedrooms and kitchen. Accounts were kept, outings were planned, stored stuff was aired and repairs undertaken. Between it all, we feasted and napped and played games and drew.  We came home from a day’s trek to find a  lovely tea laid out and that mummy had been on a petite trek of her own. Hashi frisked around and dug holes. A dream holiday.

The one to beat them all was the one in 2014 in London. We had a town house for two months. Mummy was there for a full month. She had her own room, with her aromatic pooja, her dressing table, her closet of clothes. She had the additional challenge of walking down half a flight of steps to the bathroom at least once a day and another half a flight to the kitchen for meals or the living room to watch TV. She always loved challenges. We also walked a lot. Every day she and I would go to a nearby pub to eat and drink and write her memoirs, which she would dictate and I would type.

The hum of contentment on that holiday was probably one that you could hear all over London.

I wanted to hear that hum again. In just two days it will be one year that she is not physically with us. But there are places that have her presence. If you listen, you can hear her hum.