I thought Oscar Wilde nailed it. And it's probably the biggest tribute I can give my amma.
My mother was born in Rangoon, Burma in 1935. Her father, like many other Indian nationals then, worked in the Indian Railways there. When WW2 broke out, the family was forced to return to Nellikuppam in Tamil Nadu, India. Although it is primarily an agricultural town, with paddy fields and coconut plantations being the main sources of income, it was also the site of the first sugar factory in India – E. I. D Parry (now a Murugappa Group Company).
After the war, in 1948, they went back to a newly independent Burma but things were not the same anymore. Nationalism was taking root. Not wanting to remain as foreigners there, my grandfather decided to pack up and leave Burma, this time for good and settled in Cuddalore, also known as Kadalur, located in the Cuddalore district of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
My mother went to school, played at the ice factory there, and later moved again to Bangalore, and Trichy before finally ending up at Madras (now Chennai). That’s one of the "perks" of working in the civil service. You get to see the world for free…sort of.
Amma completed high school, started working, and then in 1958, arranged by her grandmother to get married to my father in India who had gone bride hunting there and duly returned with him, newlywed, to Penang, Malaya.
She was all but 23. It must have been traumatic for her. First, getting married to someone she barely knew. Then, leaving her entire family and coming to a foreign land, with little knowledge of what was in store for her here.
Amma’s story is not just hers—it’s the story of countless women who’ve stood at the edge of familiarity and leapt into the unknown. Imagine it: 23 years old, armed with little more than a stranger’s promise and the saris in her trunk, stepping onto Malayan soil. There was No WhatsApp to soothe homesickness, no YouTube tutorials to decode her new culture, no safety net beyond her husband’s name and the hope that this gamble might bloom into something called home.
Oscar Wilde wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
Amma did more than exist. She built a bridge between worlds, brick by brick, silence by sacrifice, until “foreign” became “family.” Her journey whispers a truth we often forget: beginnings don’t require fearlessness. Just the courage to plant roots in unmarked soil and trust they’ll grow.
Postscript:
Amma died at the grand old age of 88 on 13 December 2023, the second day of Deepavali - leaving behind six children (and many others who call her amma), six grandchildren, and a battalion of neighbors, friends, and relatives who crowded the aisles—not out of duty, but because she’d turned strangers into kin.
She had arrived in Malaya with nothing but a trunk and a husband’s surname. She left with a mosaic of a life: Tamil roots tangled together on the local streets of Butterworth, and Prai mainly and wherever her journeys took her, Bagan Serai, Taiping, Ipoh & KL especially; her husband’s relatives reborn as hers, not always a smooth sailing, but in her own indomitable way, she not only survived but thrived with help from new friends who became over time, life long companions.
A bishop and a dozen priests may have presided over her funeral but the real testament came later - whenever the rest of us meet, she crops up in our thoughts and conversations.
True - there’s a hole in my heart; and in the hearts of all her loved ones, far and near that could never be replaced. She may be gone, but she is still alive, in our hearts, and memories.
The lesson for me?
You can grieve what you left behind but still grow gardens where you land.