I miss you phuppo...

one from the heart

Awoman does not necessarily have to give birth to a child to become a mother. Some women carry the same love and affection for the children around them. Such was my beloved aunt, Toshi Aapa, who tragically passed away a month shy of my eighth birthday in 2000.

Ever since I joined journalism in 2016, I kept telling myself that one day, I would write something to honour her. But to write about someone who introduced you to writing (and, in a way, to journalism) felt like a sin. How could you describe the person whom you regarded as a second mother with your scant vocabulary? Could your writing ever do justice?

I decided to write after wiring my brain to accept that I would fail in this task. But I still wanted to try. Do it anyway. And what could be better than Mother’s Day to honour someone whose death still feels like a tragedy that took place yesterday.

My aunt was the eldest among the five siblings my grandfather had with his third wife (this is not a diss at our family dynamics; just a random fact that we proudly accept and share). She was also the only one with an undergraduate degree when my paternal side moved to Karachi from Bijnor, India in the late 1960s. Naturally, the responsibility of deciding what career path her younger siblings would take fell on her. And she carried it out gracefully; she herself worked as an English teacher at Safia Khan Memorial Government Girls Secondary School.

But this is not why I want to write about her. The reason why the trauma of her death is still fresh is that she was the first person through whom I saw what an ugly disease cancer is and how it breaks families apart. It is a slow poison that kills you bit by bit, memory by memory.

When my aunt passed away, I did not know it was due to cancer. When she got diagnosed with the disease, she decided to keep it a secret and fought it on her own. Only a short time before her surgery, she told everyone about it. Miraculously, her surgery was a success. I do not remember the details, but I can recall watching her sitting with my other aunt and tearing a letter apart. Years later, my other aunt told me, in a tone filled with indescribable grief and regret, that the letter she tore was the one she wrote before her surgery. “What had she wanted us to know?” she would often wonder.

Things, unfortunately, did not go well, and her cancer relapsed - this time with a declaration that it would not go away. As treatments failed, the cancerous cells had a jailbreak moment, where they travelled freely across the body. Some of them reached her brain, impacting her memory.

I used to study with her. One day, while doing a Maths exercise, I saw her acting strange. She was delirious, and my tiny brain could not quite understand what was happening. After my homework was done, I lay down on the settee. My other aunt came to me and very lovingly tried to explain that my Toshi Aapa was ill and needed some time. I was not disappointed at how she behaved with me; I was heartbroken at her state.

There is no word to describe how you feel when you see an elder you used to rely on slowly turn into someone you cannot recognise. For a barely eight-year-old, seeing an intelligent, confident woman turn into a weak person is the same as the pain felt when a dagger pierces into the body, causing inexpressible pain before making the body numb.

And while I would have easily stored the memory in the corner of my brain, what I could never forget is the look of shock on the face of her colleague when she saw her state. That day, I just realised that whatever disease she was battling was monstrous.

Weeks after her passing away, on a day we were clearing out her wardrobe, I came across her wig - the one she bought after the brutal chemotherapy took away her hair. In that moment, my brain flashed to the day when she was offering prayers. After her prayers were done, she sat and recited some ‘duas’. I saw her dupatta slipping away and I witnessed how quickly she readjusted it - in a flash. As I held the wig, I realised there were many battles that she silently went through.

Years later, I came to know that she took early retirement because she heard some students mocking her illness. The girls were afraid that my aunt’s prolonged illness and frequent time offs would impact their performance in exams. The school’s principal tried to make concessions with my aunt, offering flexible timing. But my aunt was too afraid to be the reason for someone’s low marks and quitted her job. To this day, I cannot bring myself to visit her school - although I have gone there with her several times. Because even though the school still holds a lot of memories for me, the fact that she heard the whispers of students questioning her ability as a teacher haunts me to this date.

To keep herself busy and to not give cancer the power it desperately craved for, she got herself enrolled in a photography class. She loved taking photos. Our cabinets are filled with photo albums - a beautifully kept record of us growing up. During her last days, she took me and my younger brother to Frere Hall. She took our photos - us on monkey bars - for her project. After she left us, I developed this aversion to getting clicked.

September will complete 25 years of her death. To this day, the memory of that ill-fated Friday morning is fresh. I cannot shake the image of her best friend in the family, Baby Apa, sadly acknowledging that she had left us - forever, how simple the word is and yet how much depth it carries. At times, I wish to go to Bijnor and visit Vardhaman College to find some traces of her. Maybe the long corridor of the college still echoes with the sound of her fastened footsteps. I want to visit her old house where she spent days with her best friend, Vijay Di. Maybe the air in the house still has her scent or the sound of her hearty laugh.

Every Mother’s Day, I try to write something for her, to honour her memory. But every time I feel I do not have enough words to describe what her death means to me. This time, I decided to give it a try. It does not matter if the 8-year-old me is successful at explaining what that loss meant, what matters is that the grown up me is all ready to console her for the irreplaceable loss the little me had to endure.

The writer heads the Business Desk at The News International. She can be reached at aimen_erum@hotmail.com