Most people lose height with age and become shorter. My aunt, Hamida Salim born in 1922, who passed away this past week, defied this conventional reality. As she grew older, she gained stature and became taller in everyone’s eyes. Fine-boned and increasingly frail though she was, Amma (as I called her) retained a zest for life till the very end. This past Eid-ul-Fitr saw her enthusiastically enjoying the arrival of friends, family members, and acquaintances alike. And, on countless evenings, when the ‘regulars’ among her physician daughter’s circle gathered for a drink (or two) in Amma’s cozy living room, she was an eager, if abstaining, participant in the lively goings-on.
Born in 1922 in Rudauli, a small village near Lucknow, Amma was the youngest daughter of a feudal man, Siraj-ul-Haq, who was intent not only upon gaining higher education for himself but, after moving to the nearby big city, also upon facilitating the intellectual growth of his children. Four of them ended up becoming illustrious figures of letters and political praxis in modern Indian history: Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz (the poet, often referred to as the Keats of India), Ansar Harvani (the youthful freedom fighter who later served many terms as MP), Safia Akhtar (the renowned litterateur and author of the finest personal correspondence since the great Ghalib), and Hamida Salim, economist, educator, chef-par-excellence, raconteur, keeper of family secrets, writer, great sister and mother, an unforgettable wife, and above all, benefactor to numerous souls in need, including an orphan like me. “Come and be fed” was writ large on the door of her heart.
The canvas of Amma’s life was grand, with eras and epochs unfolding in Lucknow, Aligarh, Pune, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, London, San Francisco, and her last abode, New Delhi. While her chosen field of study was economics, Amma turned into a memoirist of formidable stature after a long career in academia. Recording her family history, the lives of her siblings, and her own travels across the globe was not a vehicle for nostalgic self-indulgence for her. It was a pathway to the simultaneous celebration and deconstruction of personal, familial, and cultural myths. It was a gift of empathy and knowledge to her reader who gained instant familiarity with what was distant in time and space. She offered hope, which is a twin of love, to her readers. And, she bestowed love, which is a twin of hope, upon her children and grandchildren and the entire clan. Remember: “come and be fed” was her motto.
Talking of remembering, a particular memory involving her comes to mind. This happened some three or four years ago. I was sitting in her living room, talking with her about this or that. Suddenly the front door opened and a tall, lanky man walked in. Amma kept her attention on what I was saying and was not perturbed by the intrusion at all. The man walked up to her, bowed, touched her feet, and then taking the staircase in the living room, quickly went upstairs and all but vanished. Intrigued I asked Amma: “Who is this guy?” She told me that the man was a surgeon who came over a couple of times during the day to smoke a cigarette on her upstairs balcony since the hospital, (on the campus of which Amma lived with her physician daughter) did not permit smoking. Then she told me to continue with my narrative. What struck me was the calm with which she reacted to the intrusion, the grace with which she bore this man’s touching her feet, the equanimity with which she accepted his need to smoke, and the ease with which she sustained her attention towards me. In Winnicott’s terms, she ‘held’ both me and the surgeon. And it is this large-hearted maternal fortitude which I salute now, as I remember her.
(The author is a professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and an author of over 70 books)
