Painting above & guest post below- by our friend, Gia George (The painting is a reproduction of a painting done by John Fernandez)

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Mama wouldn’t bother to wish me on my birthday. Instead, she would narrate her memories of giving birth to me. Am not exactly sure why she vividly remembered every detail of my birth. I must have given her a traumatic experience making my entrance into this world. I know I sure did cause her many a sleepless nights growing up. Most of the grey hairs on her head were probably from yours truly.

Yet, you would be hard pressed to find a more simple but elegant lady who cloaked herself with a quiet spirit and preferred to stay in the background. I guess my father was loud enough for both of them with his commanding presence and demeanor. Still, the long-haired beauty of her college days managed to capture his heart and mellow him over the years.

She did try her best to pass on some of her quiet spirit to me, but I was born with too much fire in my blood. I was never one to fit the mould. People who tried to do so learned well enough to leave me alone. But something of the proverbial woman in her must have slowly but surely seeped into my being over the course of the years. The fire in my blood still burns with passion, but there is a calming strength that underlies the intense blaze.

I have been gifted with her love for books. She introduced her children, at a very young age, to the magic that mere words could paint across the pages that flew through our hands. We are still voracious readers. Many a childhood afternoons were spent sprawled on the wooden floor of our parents bedroom with the quietness broken only by the whirring of the fan, and the occasional turn of a page, or a thud from a book fallen off from the hands of a sleepy reader.

Mama’s desire to paint rubbed on me at a very young age, even though I just dabbled along, while her hands brought pictures to life with colors. When I pick up the paintbrush now and allow my hands to dance across the canvas, I am reminded of a little girl who once stood by her mother’s side and watched, with wonder in her eyes, the beauty of colors leaping to life.

Mama’s love for traveling and experiencing so many different cultures, as well as her desire to try her hand at various culinary adventures has clean passed me by but has found a willing candidate in my sister. Unfortunately, her passion for playing the piano and gardening has skipped me and my siblings. We tend to kill more plants than it’s physically possible. I guess that’s a unique quality too.

A woman of many talents, but one who chose to shy away from the limelight, she found great pleasure in the beauty of nature and all of God’s creation, both great and small. My sister-in-law shared a little story of how she found my mother, out in the open, weathering the high winds of a recent cyclone just so she could move a broken-winged crow to safety from the blast of wind and rain, a bird she had been nurturing for the past couple of years. And when my boys point out the crimson sunset through the gold-flecked clouds and tells me that it reminds them of a stairway to heaven, I see her in their eyes.

Her sudden death, about a month ago, was an unexpected blow to the entire family. There is a saying in my native language that perfectly describes the void she has left behind, “You don’t realize the value of your eyes when you can still see.” Each one of us, in his or her own way, is still trying to find their way back to the safe haven. Her death has left us drifting in the treacherous seas. Some find solace in watering her plants, others in pouring over her hand-written recipe books, while a few of us listen to Jim Reeves crooning deep into the night, as she often used to.

But the most precious gift I have of Mama’s is the little treasure I found on her bedside table. As I tried to come to terms with her sudden departure in the initial days, I would often sit on her side of the bed and go through the past. I remembered the times she would let me open her built-in cupboard and admire her neatly pressed Sarees, stacked and sorted out based on the colour, fabric and occasion. Sometimes I would dig deep in between the stacks and pull out her prized perfume bottles that came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Other times, I would bother her with incessant demands and on the spur requests that must have truly tried her patience.

Woolgathering on her bed, my glance fell on her little black leather-bound Bible. Picking it up carefully, not wanting to rip apart the fragile seams, I gently turned the pages of the Bible to see page after page of underlined verses and scribbled notes in every available space. Though her Bible was in a language I have always had difficulty in reading and understanding, all her hand written notes were in a language I could easily take in.

And as I poured through the words she had written, I began to see a part of my mother that I had never fully taken the time to understand. Thoughts and words that if she had shared in her lifetime, I would have taken it and let it pass by. But as I sat there reading, each word echoed the beauty of God and His faithfulness in her life. Soft words, like a balm that has healing power, poured over my aching heart. Words that God foreordained, as she penned them years and months before, to one day bring healing, comfort and strength to a wounded soul. My God knew I would need Mama’s quiet guiding words of wisdom more so in the coming days and years of my life than ever before. It was like my Savior’s tender whisper, “Even though your mother is now with Me, I have allowed her to leave a treasure so great for you in that little Bible of hers.”

So, I leave you with one of her quotes, “To understand God’s ways, we must see beyond the moment to the final work that He is doing. We must never judge things prematurely. What appears to be weakness, God can transform to greatness; what appears to be loss, He can turn to gain; what looks like failure, He can turn to victory. The hard thing you are going through is not the final chapter. There is more to be seen and known. God’s ways always bring about happy endings to those who leave the final word with Him.”

~Gia

My mother with two of her younger sisters in law.