Suzie

Snapshots captured in my mind do get buried with time.. but when they pop up, I can see them as if from an old tape.. not just that i can remember the visuals, but also the voices, the sorroundings, the aroma and the feel of it all. Suzie popped up in my mind today , I have'nt seen her for the past ten years, but i got the pictures quite well, her curly hair, her smile, her laughter, her faded brown jeans, her sandals and such particulars.. but more than anything i remember the wax idol of Mother Mary in her pocket and the fluoroscent green rossary she kneads in her fingers as she says her daily prayers and a drop or two of her tears which just overflowed from her heart and  fell down from the corner of her eyes.

Suzie was one of the pretty faces I had seen,  very bubbly and something innocent about her ways. She was pursuing her twelfth standard correspondence course, she looked around eighteen , but I was told later that she is nearing her thirties. She was the receptionist in the hostel I stayed in, and stayed next door to mine. I noticed her english accent, when she says 'sh' for 's', and her use of 'man' anywhere in a sentence. She would say, 'come man',  ' listen man'. I was picking up all of these Anglo Indian slangs from her. She baked delicious cakes, and brought for me fish curry dipped in thick coconut milk with slit green chillies and flavored with kokum.., see I am getting the aroma too in the snapshots..my mouth waters.

I didnt know anything more about her till many months later, when she started opening up with me. She was working there so that she is given shelter free of cost and food, the cost of which was deducted from her pay. She would do a lot of chores for the nuns there, to earn a bit more. She would iron their clothes, she told me with lot of anger on herself, and she might have been doing their vessels or what else, I didnt venture more. The hostel inhabitants being students from well to do families, Suzie had felt odd telling anyone about her, specially so everyone took her just like one of them. 

She started unveiling gradually to me, she justified saying that she somehow trusted me. I have'nt betrayed her trust till now.. This is my first attempt to do so. Suzie had never been sent to school. No one bothered to. Niether her father nor her father's wife, whom she called "mummy". Her own mother was a maid who was sent back to her own village after childbirth. Suzie had never seen her and doesnt know anything more about her. She grew up at home unschooled and alone. She had a  mute deaf sister, whom she loved the most, probably because she might have been the only person who had been kind to her. Her brother played for a band and another one was a radiologist. The eldest sister was a spinster and very sour too. Father has married twice, the second time the woman who was the governess for the children born out of his first wife and I guess it is the second wife that Suzie calls "mummy" with love.  This is the picture of her family which she drew for me.

Suzie, at some point of time had been kept in a convent for school dropouts and such children, where she was taken care of by nuns and that is how she reached this hostel and job. She completed her SSC at the convent and was working to study further. She had no guide, no parent and her existence wouldnt matter much to anyone in her family except maybe for the diferently abled sister. Suzie had dreams, of studying, of getting a good job and life. And she was on her own working her way towards her dreams. She always kept a wax idol of Mother Mary in her pocket, told me she was her mother, her own mother.  I remember that was the only time I saw Suzie's heart leaking through the corner of her eyes.. I left the hostel for good and I have lost touch with her.

I learnt from Suzie what it takes to be a strong woman, and I realized for once how weak and feeble I was, though I considered myself otherwise. One's strength is tested at crossroads of life where one is left alone with no means of living,  with nothing and no one to lean on to,  no way to go and nothing to look forward to. Making  a life on your own, that too a girl right from her tender age, unsupported, is not a small achievement. After having been brought up  in a secured environment with all  amenities and well taken care of, if a woman claims herself to be strong, though true, that strength is a cabined one, which works only in pre-set situations. I salute 'ant' women like Suzie who carry weight so disproportionately high to their own.