It is still difficult to walk around at the Ashram, imagining Ammaji coming out of the rooms or sitting where she was always sitting. The most difficult area is her and Babbaji’s room, where she spent a big part of the day, preparing spices or herbs, knitting, taking care of Apra, writing shopping lists and basically managing the Ashram. We don’t avoid the room though but spend as much time there as possible and that has one reason: we do everything to support our father now, for whom this loss is most tragic. She was his wife, the love of his life.
We had plans to celebrate her and Babbaji’s golden jubilee next year. 50 years of a happy marriage. They had married when he was twenty and she was only sixteen. From that time on, their youth and young adulthood, until now, the beginning of their old age, they had been together.
I have seen more love in between my mother and father than I have ever seen in any other relationship. My parents were an example for me for how close two people can be, how much love they can have for each other and how much they can be connected. Their relationship was something very special. I never saw them fight, I always saw how they lovingly teased each other, how they made small jokes, laughed and loved.
Babbaji is the one who has done and is still doing a lot in the garden but there is a small area in our garden which is surrounded by a net that keeps monkeys away – this is Ammaji’s part of the garden. Here she planted vegetables and even banana, coconut, pineapple and mango trees. It was her dream to see these trees grow and make us taste the fruit from her own garden. She proudly harvested fenugreek, spinach, lots of broccoli and more from her garden. While my father planted flowers, she planted vegetables and they were always jokingly having arguments about what should be planted. ‘Plant something that you can eat, that has some use!’ she would say. Now it is very difficult for Babbaji to look at this part of the garden, at the plants that she had planted and watered with her own hands and the coconut tree, which she had just bought some days ago, in the hope to see a coconut there in four years.
Just how Ammaji was a loving mother, the embodiment of a mother, she was also the most loving wife. She knew about every small preference of my father, from what he wore to what he ate, when he like to go where and what he would be thinking. They always ate together and she waited for him to come home, even if it was late, just so that they could share their meal. She did so much for him and he for her. He told us how they had laid down on her last evening, ready to go to sleep and they had been holding each other’s hands, like every night.
It breaks my heart that she is gone and it breaks it over and over again to see my father and know how much he is missing her. Who will eat the vegetables of his plate when he didn’t want them anymore? Whom will he buy small pieces of jewelry for? Who will know where every small thing in his room is situated so that he can ask and doesn’t need to search? Whose hand will he hold now, when he goes to sleep?
He sees her in everything that he does, even more than we do. When he closes his eyes, she is there. When he opens them, she is not. We do our best to be around, to sit on his bed how we were always doing with him and Ammaji, to eat with him and Naniji, just like the three were always eating together, to include him in every decision we take that previously Ammaji had been taking. Yashendu even sleeps in his room, so that he won’t be alone even in the night.
But we know that whenever he seems to be looking far away, at nothing particular in the room, that she was on his mind. Ammaji, his Suman, his flower, the woman he had married and loved every single day of her marriage. The woman whom he gave a last kiss on the forehead on Monday before bringing her body down to the Yamuna.
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My relationship with my father
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