594. My Brilliant Mum

                       Mum, reading (painting by Dad)

Mother’s Day has come and gone, and mine was on my mind all day. Although it has now been more than six years since she passed away, I still have not been able to sit with my memories of her and write anything that does her justice. In the evening I pulled out two manila folders of her writing, mostly essays she wrote when she was taking courses toward her B.A. at Harvard Extension School—while working at a full-time day job, mind you. What I found in them was humbling. 



I hadn’t always realized how seriously Mum took her learning—from independent reading, courses, lectures—and retirement made no difference to that seriousness. For a few years she was a member of a reading group in which the participants took it in turns to choose the book of the month. When it was Mum’s turn she took copious notes, read interviews with the author and on the historical setting, pored over critical essays on the book, and anxiously prepared—no, over-prepared—an introductory presentation. Invariably she chose an author her group were unlikely to be familiar with—Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie were two that I remember—and felt that it was her responsibility to help the group understand and appreciate their work. But she was invariably disappointed. She would come home telling me that the host had been more interested in showing off her best china tea set than in discussing the book or that several people hadn’t even finished reading it.

academic snobbery

Mum’s other disappointments with the book group came from the fact that many of the participants were academics or had advanced degrees and would discuss the text at hand using obscure academic jargon that effectively excluded and humiliated her, as someone who was wonderfully well-read and worldly wise but not a literary scholar. Eventually the combination of the lack of seriousness and the academic snobbery led her to quit the group altogether.

Besides her participation in the book group Mum volunteered as an ESL teacher to wives of international graduate students, volunteered as an aide in an ESL after-school program, was an active member of a group called the Third Age, and took several Learning in Retirement courses taught by retired college professors that were as rigorous as any college course. I regret now that I was so preoccupied with my own work that I didn’t take the time to appreciate hers, thereby reproducing the behavior in others that hurt her the most.

Every Which Way – Maurice Bilk PPRBS. To Remember the evacuation of millions of British children separated from their families during WWII (Photo: Tim Ellis)

As a brilliant girl from a working-class background, Mum was in love with learning and with life. She aced the eleven-plus exam and won a scholarship to grammar school, but her secondary school experience was badly disrupted by the Second World War when she and her school, Parliament Hill School, were evacuated out of London and she had to live with a series of foster families who were neglectful at best. After school she went out to work and while she went out dancing and to the movies with her best girlfriend, she also furthered her education with night classes.

There was no opportunity for Mum to further her formal studies in Greece and India while we were growing up, but she continued to teach English to children—in India, to Dalit children who lived on the outskirts of the campus—and to learn languages herself. It was only when my sister was in college and I at work that Mum started taking night classes again, two every semester until she earned first her Associate’s and then her Bachelor’s degree. Looking now at the piles of term papers she wrote over the years, I am overwhelmed. How has it taken me so long to read them?

Here are some of the titles: 


• Control: A Classless Condition
• The Evolution of Discipline in Early Childhood: Development and Social Policy 

• Summerhill: For and Against
• Depression: Classification, Etiology and Treatment—A Brief Overview
• Caste and Hinduism: Dominant Themes and Modal Personality

Knowing Mum, the topics above make perfect sense. She had always been an advocate for loving, child-centered models of education that fostered creativity. With her working-class background and strong sense of justice, she had always been interested in the effects of class and caste in society. And working as she did for a psychiatrist who had taken a leading role in studying treatments for depression and schizophrenia, she was interested in how treatments for depression had evolved, developing drugs that both held considerable promise and had serious limitations.

But what humbled me the most were these two papers:

• The Politics of Nuclear Power and Our Health

Mum wrote this for a course on The Sociology of Medicine with Elliott Krause (author of Power and Illness: The Political Sociology of Health and Medical Care) in January 1988, when, at 23, I was passionately involved in the anti-nuclear power movement. Clearly, Mum, who was always supportive of my pursuits even as she worried about my future, had set out to study the nuclear industry for herself. Just flipping through the sections of the paper I can see that she investigated the nuclear fuel cycle, corporate investments in uranium mining and processing, studies on the health effects of radiation, attitudes of the medical profession toward diagnostic radiation and nuclear power, and political interventions. Wow. If only I had listened to her more, actually talked with her, rather than just holding forth, talking at her. She could have taught me a thing or three.

• The Role that China Played in Changing the East India Company’s Relationship with India

It was only relatively recently, through reading Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008-2015) and his non-fictional Smoke and Ashes (2024), that I became acquainted with the Opium Wars and what drove them. And here was Mum, back in 1986, before I even started my graduate studies, taking a course on India Under the British with the eminent historian of South Asia David Washbrook and writing a paper on the causes and effects of the opium trade.

Mum was so intelligent, passionate about learning, socially committed. As a mother, she built me up. Listened to me patiently, even as I talked incessantly. Was full of admiration for my work, my intellect. Said nothing about her own. I still find slips of paper in books she borrowed from me or read because I had recommended them, with her own thoughts on them. Did we sit down and discuss them afterwards? Probably not, because when I went to Mum and Dad’s house, she would insist that I put my feet up and relax while she simultaneously brought me tea, played with Baby Nikhil, and prepared dinner.

Oh, how I long to listen to her now! All I have is her papers. But I will read them with deep gratitude and remember my brilliant mum.

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