Almost five decades have gone by since I was a student at the St Annes school in Pune. I always got the first rank in all subjects, including Marathi which was a difficult subject for the non marathi speaking students.
Every score in every subject was the hard work put in by my mother, who made sure that my two brothers and I would get all the guidance we needed from who ever was able to help us.
Most of the time, my late mother, Morwareed or Moti as she was better known, would facilitate our study hours, make sure we had good nutrition, and a good atmophere to learn. She herself had managed only studying upto the eighth standard (which was the second last grade before cambridge school graduation, in her time). My mother always wanted all her three children to enjoy whatever she had been denied due to financial constraints.
My mother would revise every subject with each of us, and for Marathi and Hindi, she would request our neighbour, the Pagadaloo family's eldest daughter, who was a teacher, to guide us. The Pagadaloo family lived in our huge bungalow as tenants, and they were a flourishing family of, I think nine children, and their matriach, Sivama. I recall that their father had passed away when all the children were quite young, and the mother and older sibling, took over responsibility. The father had taught my father driving in his ambassador taxi, and my late father always reminded us how well he had guided him.
I have forgotten the name of the oldest sibling who was the main person who helped us to compose marathi essay assignments, but I shall never forget her kind and encouraging words. She never refused to help us in any assignment, and was a very extraordinary guide, for the few times that we would go to her for marathi essays.
My late mother was a very compulsive personality and would pursue any task with all her resources and achieve the result she wanted. So it was that she wanted us to be able to be fluent in Marathi speaking, not only to get good marks at school but she realized that as maharashtrians, we needed to know the local language well, to survive and flourish in the state of our birth.
So, she would take all three of us and sometimes the pagadaloo kids, or the parsee neighbour's kids, or even the sindhi neighbour's kids, whoever was willing to come for watching a marathi play at the Bal Gandharva Rang Mandir at Deccan gymkhana. And we would all travel by PMT bus. Those were the sixties and seventies, when television was not yet easily available.
So, all of us would be standing in the long lines at Bal Gandharva theatre, one zorastrian lady, my mother, conspicuous in her parse style saree and three of her kids wearing outfits that were not the regular marathi audience wear, with shoes and socks and me, the girl, in a pretty embroidered frock. So it was that we had to sit through the entire three to four hour marathi stage play, often not comprehending the language but yet listening and learning. Mr Raj Thackeray would be pleasantly surprised if he ever has a chance to converse with me in marathi.
Our foursome was a regular at the marathi cinema theatres which were in the city area, near mandai, far from our camp home. Pinjra shall always be the film that touched my soul, and I have watched it at least ten times, with tears in my eyes every time. Because of the incessant efforts of my late mother, all three of her children, are fluent in marathi, which often leads to raised eyebrows from whomsoever we converse with, especially at government offices.
Now that I look back at the immense efforts my mother made to educate us, I realize her contribution towards making me the person I am today. I shall always recall with fondness the slim cane she used to whack us with, to make us learn our spellings. Thank you my dearest mother, you were the best mother in the whole world, and I miss you.
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