I do not have any photographs of the late Langfordammachi, as she was known to me, or more commonly referred to as Mariammakochamma, wife of the late George Matthan, my father's elder brother, in my archives. I pay my tribute to her verbally.
Today, I remember her on what would have been her 97th birthday. She passed away 19 years ago, in 1986, two years after we left India. But she remains vividly in my memory.
This heroic aunt of mine struggled as she looked after her husband, my godfather, as he battled through almost 15 years of Parkinson's which slowly turned him into an immobile human totally dependent on his wife. I respect her for the sheer determination by which she lived through those years caring for her husband.
Such courage is hard to come by. Langfordammachi saw her husband lose all his strength day by day. And yet, at any time I walked into the house, she greeted me with such love and affection and asked after each and every member of my family. It was as if all the troubles on her mind were of least importance. She focused on me, the godson of her husband, a fact she never, never forgot at every meeting.
Langfordammachi was the mother of the late Ammnikochamma, Baluchachen and Anand, three wonderful cousins with truly outstanding and talented better-halves, Babychayan, Nirmalakochamma and Shallu. She was the grandmother of Vinod, Vinita, Uday, Purnima, Rahul and Rohit, six grandchildren she would be enormously proud of were she alive today.
The person who shares this birthday is her sister-in-law, my mother.
My mother, Mrs. Kuriyan Matthan, Jr., would have been 91 today. She was a wonderful loving personality. But she was tough. The toughness grew as she aged and she was called in to solve many problems between her brothers.
Her greatest regret was that she could not solve the problems between her two sons.
The only time that I know that she broke down, in toto, was when she lost her eldest daughter, Nalini, so tragically on October 29th, 1960. As I held her hand at the moment, she wept and told me that losing any of her children was what she had feared from the moment that her very first child had been born.
The closest she had come to that, she said, was when she literally saw me ebbing away in her eyes while I was many tens of kilometres away, at the very moment I was drowning in a river at Vasind near Bombay in 1955. She remembered, at that moment, how the glass of milk she was giving me at 5:30 am before I set out to the station slipped and shattered as she handed it to me. It had come as a foreboding for her. She had warned me of the dangers ahead. She had gone to her prayer room and prayed almost non-stop till I returned.
Her joy when I was brought home alive was something that was greater than anything else she had ever felt in her life. (She compared that to the biblical feeling of the father welcoming back his prodigal son.)
But at this tragic moment of losing her daughter, she knew that her return would not be similarly possible.
She resolved to come out of this tragedy by bringing up Nalini's son.
This was probably her greatest failing. She tried to be both mother and grandmother to this little boy till he became a man. She tried, aganst all odds, to instill in him her values over his genetically inherited characteristics. She realised that the values she instilled in me as a mother could not be instilled in her eldest grandson. She reconciled herself to that a few years before her passing. She prayed night and day that this little boy would have at least some of the loving nature of his mother - something which unfortunately was not to be.
In my last hours with her in March 2000, just a few hours before she went into a coma, she exposed part of her innermost heart to me. She told me, in her most direct manner as a loving mother, her anxiety of the enormous problems that would survive her on her passing.
I reassured her that I was quite competent to take care of the problems that I would face. I told her I had seen how her eldest brother, faced with similar problems, had been able to go through his life so courageously. In my case, I was fortunate to have such a loving wife, who was constantly at my side in these troubled times, so she had nothing to worry about.
And exactly as envisaged by her, I have had to do so since her passing. The bastardization of her family was the last thing she expected when she brought us up - but she knew it was coming.
Ammachi's relationship with Annikki is something none of the immediate family ever understood. Ammachi opposed my marriage till the day we were married. Then she wrote to me, "What God had put together, let no man put asunder".
And that was how she showed her love for her daughter-in-law, despite the "elitism racism" from other immediate family members. Her love and respect for Annikki grew immensely when Annikki cared for her when she broke her hip. It was Annikki who washed her and cared for her in those crucial days and weeks after she came home from the hospital.
As a tribute to her birthday, in the 5th year since her passing, I present a montage of some of her photographs from my archives.
It reveals her beauty as well as her fun-loving character. It also reveals the character of an outstandingly tough but loving human being. As a mother she was an outstanding personality.
I will be writing of some of her outstanding characteristics, as only a son knows his mother, in this blog in the coming weeks and months.
I am sorry for the quality of the old photographs. Kindly click on a photograph to see an enlarged version in your browser, which may appear slightly better than the smaller versions below.
 Womens' Christian College, Madras |  Wedding Photo |  |
 |  and her childhood teacher / Principal, Miss Brookesmith |  |
 and 8 daughters-in-law, Madras, 1952 |  parents and children |  Joanna and Mika, 1983 |
 her children |  |  |
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