My mother worked as a housemaid for a recently retired couple, Vimla and K.K.R. Rao, in Bangalore. The lady had been a professor of home science and her husband an Indian Railway Service official. My father was a factory worker by day. Since he also moonlighted as a watchman in the same apartment complex where Mother worked, my first home was a small room meant for the staff there. In the 1980s, as a little girl in school, I wanted someday to become “Dr Hemavathi,” wear a white coat and help a lot of sick people—an incredible dream for any child in my situation.
My mother’s employers, the Raos, were always concerned about us. I started calling them Appavru and Ammavru—a most respectful way of saying Father and Mother in Kannada. As I began to read, they bought me books and encouraged me. Appavru gave me Kannada lessons. Ammavru told me that my handwriting was beautiful. When my mother felt I should attend an English-medium school, just like the other kids in the complex, the Raos offered to pay the fees. They even gave me breakfast before I left for school. I had to work hard to keep up with my privileged, well-off classmates.
Life at home was always tense, since my father drowned much of his earnings in drink and cigarettes. Yet my mother struggled on bravely for me and Prashanth, my younger brother. One day our already miserable world suddenly turned upside-down. Father was found lying dead in a ditch by the road. To add to our woes, the managers of the apartment complex asked us to vacate our room. Mother pleaded for more time, but our water and electricity connections were shut off to force us out.
It was Ammavru and Appavru who came to our rescue. They both taught yoga at Bangalore’s Atma Darshan Yogashram. They asked the officials there to employ my mother as a cook so that we would also get accommodation in the campus. Even today, 22 years on, my mother works there.
“You keep studying hard,” Appavru advised me, after driving us there.
“Education will change everything,” Ammavru added, as my mother looked on with pride. Indeed, as I moved up in school, I met their high expectations, always topping my class. When I showed them my report card or won a prize for academic excellence, their faces would lit up. And then i climbed the ladder of my ambition to finish my mbbs and then my post graduation with the support of my mentors and the scholarships i won.
Yes education changed everything for me.
One night a man came to our house and told me, “There is a family with eight children. They have not eaten for days,” I took some food and I went. When I finally came to the family, I saw the faces of those little children disfigured by hunger. There was no sorrow or sadness in their faces, just the deep pain of hunger. I gave the rice to the mother. She divided it in two, and went out, carrying half the rice with her. When she came back, I asked her, “Where did you go?” She gave me this simple answer, “To my neighbors-they are hungry also.” I was not surprised that she gave–because poor people are generous. But I was surprised that she knew they were hungry. As a rule, when we are suffering, we are so focused on ourselves we have no time for others. ANOTHER STORY TO COMPLETE THIS A well known speaker started off his seminar by holding up a $20 bill. In the room of 200, he asked, "Who would like this $20 bill? "Hands started going up. He said, "I ...
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