Brightness

What do you get when you put the following aspects of a person's life together? :
An inter-community love marriage, adjusting to quaint norms of a new family with courage and in the face of considerable criticism, forsaking personal goals to shift to a new country in order to be with one's spouse (who was working there), setting up a home from nearly scratch, battling the odds of miscarriages and fighting desperately for the life of a preemie baby and gradually bringing up two beautiful sons, becoming aware of a terminal illness at a devastatingly early age, fighting and recovering from it, returning to India with family only to be the victim of emotional abuse by the spouse, being abandoned by the spouse and left to look after the children on most days while he 'takes them on weekends', starting life anew as and making a career for herself in the difficult line of public relations and event management, juggling this with nurturing and bringing up the boys single-handedly and most importantly holding her head high and smiling resolutely through all of the above...

You get my aunt, Gopa.

If you ever get the chance to meet her, you'll know why I've titled this entry so. Her's is the proverbial smile that can light up a room (also, she has a great liking for bright colours, which go well with her pretty face and complexion). Nothing in your interactions will make you aware of the fact that she has emerged victorious from some of the most debilitating trials of life and has reclaimed her power one painful step at a time. She's the kind of person who will make you laugh as freely and as often as she does, she will be more interested in you than most others...and genuinely so.

I still remember the peculiar feeling of numbness that shrouded our family when we first got to know of her cancer...the feelings of helplessness, frustration and fear were overpowering. She was thousands of miles away in some part of the USA, literally without a social support system, with a family to look after and job that she was committed to. The infinite benefits of modern communication simply paled when compared to our instantaneous need to be with her. At that time, nobody had the financial means to rush to the USA on such short notice. For a long time she was left alone to fend off her illness, the side-effects of the treatment, emotional and interpersonal difficulties with her spouse and much more, all by herself. The children were not unaffected by all this either, their tender years being marked inescapably by all these difficulties.

It was with much unpleasantness, mercifully tempered by the strength God lent us, that we got her back to India. One would have thought that with so much family at relatively close range, her problems would soon come to an end. This however, turned out to be a wish that would not be granted. The brief respite was soon interrupted by emotional abuse and infidelity from her spouse followed by his abandoning her, as previously mentioned.

Countless others might have fallen to pieces in her position, but not my aunt Gopa. The pain of a hundred wounds has receded to the level of a dull ache that emerges occasionally and darkens a few hours, but overall, she is the living image of someone who has seized her day. Through all her traumas she has worked to find and establish a network of like-minded people who have acknowledged her strengths and abilities. What is more, her dynamism and will to live have been instrumental in her being offered the role of a partner in a PR firm recently started by her colleagues and her (the firm is literally and all-women team and each of the team members is a strong-willed and intelligent achiever). In her own words, "women need to know that no matter what happens in life you can pick up and make your dreams come true"...and I take the liberty of generalising this to all humanity.

Within a matter of a few months, my aunt has reached a point where she is indispensable to her organisation and now works tirelessly for it. The clients appreciate her professionalism, the subordinates love her pleasant style and her peers value her contributions. And you have only to see her around her children, or to hear her speaking about them to know how much they dote on each other.

So, when I titled this entry "brightness", I decided to salute the indomitable power of the human spirit that my 'Gogu' (my personal nickname for her) personifies...the courage to rise above adversity, to make every effort towards self-healing, to cast aside the fetters of emotional dependence and to simply BE in the moment, love without restraint and laugh like its something she just discovered.