A Holiday find so powerfully & magically weaved into my Heart that it has not left me ever since...

While holidaying in Pune as my hubby & I strolled around Deccan, he spotted a Book fair (The owner imports second-hand international books). One of the books that caught my attention there was 'The Joy Luck Club' by Amy Tan about the lives of 4 Chinese women in pre-1949 China and the lives of their American-born daughters in California.

The cover-back said- "Amy Tan's brilliant novel flits in and out of many realities but all of them contain mothers and daughters... Each story is a fascinating vignette and together they weave the reader through a world where the Moon Lady can grant any wish, where a child at two and delivered at 12, can, with cunning, free herself; where a rich man's concubine secures her daughter's future by killing herself and where a woman can live on, knowing she has lost her entire life".

Each mother- daughter story in this book reminds me of different facets of my relationship with my mother. Outwardly, mothers love their sons more but inwardly their relationship with their daughters is special, very special. A mother knows that men are weak and so they need their mothers or wives even more than a daughter would need her mother and she also knows that she has given all her strength to her daughter while she was still in her womb. A mother may not tell her daughter that she is always there for her but will always be there for her daughter, no matter how cross she is with her daughter. However much a daughter thinks her mother is incapable of understanding her, deep within she knows that her mother can read her like a book. The daughter is afraid that what her mother observes or remarks might be true or might come true in the future. That's not all about how they are linked.

When a daughter is born the mother sees it as another life to be what she herself couldn't be, to do what she in her life couldn't do, to save her child from what she couldn't save herself, to achieve the goals and live the life that she couldn't. All her hopes and ambitions come alive on seeing her daughter's lovely face for the first time when she is also trying to see if her daughter looks like anything she had an image of in her own mind and from that moment itself she is a proud mother of a daughter even before the daughter can open her little eyes or do anything to make her mother proud.

Every mother sees herself in her daughter and when the daughter starts seeing herself in her mother is when she has truly understood her mother and is able to heal her mother.

As children a lot of us may have felt ashamed of our parents'/ mother's broken English/ Hindi, the way they dressed or the way they spoke to us in front of our friends. A lot of us must have been ashamed of the way our homes looked or the way it was done up. At times I too was guilty of feeling one of these things and then I would reprimand myself for thinking like that and remind myself that no matter what I love my Mom the way she is and no one on the Earth can replace her. My mother lost her mother very early in life and all she wanted when she became a mother was to be there with us at every step, she wanted to give all she never got. To me, she is the best Mom on Earth and she is my Mom!

However much I'd like to keep going on I cannot cause all said and done each one of us knows the importance and the meaning of having a mother in our lives. And since I need to end this post somewhere I will end it with an excerpt from the book, the first page of 'The Joy Luck Club'.

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in the hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!- it is too beautiful to eat.
Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks towards America. On her journey she cooed to her swan: "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for."
But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.
Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions." And she waited year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.


I love you Mamma!!! :)