Of Super Heroes and Super Mom

“I like the super hero music” - you whispered in my ear while watching the first thriller sequence during Incredibles-2. Its summer vacations for you and both of us had gone to watch the movie together. So far you were not so keen on watching movies in cinemas or watching superhero stuff at all but somehow I think watching miarulous ladubug has helped convert you into a fan of the genre.
You liked the movie and came back with a couple of favorites - unsurprisingly teenaged Violet and the toddler ‘Jack Jack’ were the ones that caught your fancy. I guess you are too young to appreciate the super strengths of the dad and mom in the movie.

Dear Daughter
This one is short on details about you and more about things happening around you. For this has been a strangely disruptive summer and not always in a good way.

Your Daadi, my mom, has been with us in UK for a while now on an Indian Passport. This summer we had a major victory. After years of complicated efforts involving money, mettle and mountains of patience, she can now potentially stay here with us as per her wishes and not be restricted by restrictions on a visa. We celebrated this victory around the end of May.
However, the seasaw of life does like to dip you down into doldrums when you least suspect. Daadi had travelled to the US after your birthday to spend some time with Bobbie Shaashaa and to attend her nephew’s wedding in September. Just before we travelled to the US to join her for the annual family holiday, her long pending diagnosis came through and we learnt of her Lymphoma.

The C word is still a bit too harsh to write and accept in our minds and it does seem like a cruel planning on fate’s part. As it transpires, when we were waiting with supressed joy for the final good news on that immigration matter to be delivered, fate was at work plotting the next challenge for Daadi. She noticed a lump near her collar bone and we started doing the rounds to the doctors to get it tested but didn’t hear anything untoward until middle of July 2018 - barely a few days after we were done celebrating her immigration victory.

At this day and age, medical science assures us that if one is unlucky enough to have a cancer, Lymphoma is the good one to have as it has one of the best rates of responding to treatment and be cured. We take a lot of solace in that but there is still the scary proposition of the treatment itself wrecking havoc with its side effects. Merely going through the long list of potential dreadful effects of chemotherapy is sickening by itself. There are umpteen stories of so-and-so giving up hope during treatment and succumbing to the combination of drugs and dispair rather than the disease itself.

This is where my Super Mom’s story starts, yet again. We started with her first treatment delivered last friday and so far her will power and inner strength has not betrayed her the slightest bit. I’m all the more confident of this being another one of her famous victories.

If you haven’t heard the story yet, here’s a legend involving a real hero closer to your heart. Did you know there is no known official date of birth or even place for my Mom?
The reason is that she was born during the time India was going through a painful partition in August 1947. My grandparents lived in what is now known as Pakistan and being non-muslims, they were forced to leave everything they owned and migrate to the Indian side. Somehow within the first few days after my mom was born, her parents, my grandpa and grandma were seperated in the commotion. My Grandpa was left with mom wrapped in some rags and no proper means of food and water for either of them.
The legend goes that he carried the new born baby, my mom, still in those rags and tied to his back for 11 days and travelled by foot to some refugee camps on the Indian side. As fate would have it, there in those camps, he was reunited with my grandma. As mom herself now narrates, my Grandpa handed over the by-now 13 odd days old baby in a bundle to my grandma and said in Punjabi “ऐ ले तेरी अमानत। मैन्नु नहीं पता जींदी वी है की मोयी है !” (Here’s your treasure. I am not even aware if she’s even alive by now)

As we know now, she was very much alive and how ! She has had a persistently dry cough throughout her life, presumably as a result of parching her throat in those very early days of her existence. Nevertheless, that was life baptising her with fire right from the word go and she came out victorious.

Since then, she has had a vast range of ups and downs. Life does that to everyone, but her’s seems to be an unfairly bigger, deeper share of lows and they appear at every single stage in her life. A woman of 32 having to bring up three boys anywhere in the world is by no means an easy thing to do. She did it in a small town in India of all places and well, the three of us aren’t the worst of human beings ! To say the least, she passed with flying colours, although some might argue she broke all barometers of success on that front.

Dear daughter,
There isn’t a super hero speed chase in sight and there isn’t a superhero kind of background music playing anywhere. But I can feel that thrill and the music that goes with it. Maybe so too can my brothers and your shaashi and mom. Because this is a scene where a super mom’s, my mom’s, super strength is at work. The super strength of winning against all odds, maybe with a little cough as signs of a battle fought hard.