Mothers! We gotta learn from them

My mother is Jhansi ki Rani! No doubt about it.

But wait … before you folks start scratching your puzzled heads, let me clear the air for you.

When I say my mother is Jhansi ki Rani, I say it metaphorically. We all know from our history lessons in school that the Queen of Jhansi was a formidable and daring figure.

Amma is as brave, if not more. She’s a one-woman army, my mother!

The Queen of Jhansi had her enemies – mainly the British who invaded our dear motherland and made it their own for, like … forever! My mother has hers – the four, six or more-legged creatures that dare to invade her precious home and try to make it their own. But none have lived to tell the tale! Not with mum around. She and her faithful broomstick have gone on several brave missions around the house and vanquished many an enemy – small rats, big rodents, cockroaches, frogs, centipedes and at times lethal looking scorpions too. When she’s in battle mode even we don’t dare take a chance and we keep out of her line of fire.

When the twins were younger and we would be down at Ambalpady for our annual summer vacations we have had first-hand experiences of these daring battles. On one such occasion, we had an exciting night of combat with a rat which had ventured in. Mum, with dad as her commander-in-chief, literally made the enemy run around and sweat profusely, before it scurried off outside, defeated. Needless to say, we three had already scurried off to our bedroom upstairs! The next morning, the boys asked me if the battle was over and could they safely venture downstairs and we did, to find amma now prowling around with a long broomstick. The boys fed on a liberal dose of Harry Potter wanted to know if their dodda flew around the house on a broomstick and it was no wonder she got so much work done in so less time. Meanwhile, amma surveyed the ceiling with the eye of an army general scanning the battlefield for enemies.

“How dare you come into my parlour?” asked my mother to the spider, before she brandished the broomstick with the technique of a Kalaripayattu expert and swept the 8-legged thing off to the ground.

If you think all this is routine stuff and not meriting a gallantry award, then stick around, I’ll tell you more.

One evening, recently, I popped by at the parents’ place for a bit of gentle family gossip and she casually mentioned that they’d had a most weird guest at their home the previous evening.

“Who?” I asked but she was not to be hurried. It was her story and she was going to tell it in her way.

“So, there I was”, said my mother, “gently snoozing in the recliner post-lunch, and I hear a heavy thud by the window right next to me. I turn round to look and what do I see, but a one-metre-long snake looking back at me! It must have landed on the ground from behind the curtain and before I could blink, it slithered off to God knows where!”

“A snake?” I screamed, pulling my legs up on to the chair. “Inside the house? How did it get in? What did you do?” And the most important question – “Where is it now?” And I looked furtively around.

“Obviously it’s gone now!” she said, as calm as you please.

“How?” I asked. “Did you call the wildlife people? The police? The local snake charmer?” And I wondered what I would have done under similar circumstances. Leaped onto the dining table and stayed there, without doubt.

My 85-year young mother then calmly tells me, “I didn’t call anyone. I searched for it, found it hiding behind the dustbin beneath the wash-basin and gently tapping the ground with a long stick I drove it through the back door and out into the back yard.

“And it went? Just like that? With you doing the tap dance?” I asked, my eyes almost popping out.

Amma nodded. “It was frightened, you know!” she said serenely.

And our Ambalpady ki Rani wasn’t!

Of course, tell us something we don’t know!