My mother Jena, was a devout, highly intelligent and independent minded Muslim woman. She was made to leave school at fifteen and lived a tough life without losing her bearings or surrendering totally to misogynist traditions or patriarchal pressures. The word for virtue, in Gujarati and Kutchi, my home languages, is satuguna, meaning good, pure, Excellent, eminent. To her, satguna was goodness but goodness that was active, personal, internally interrogated, difficult at times, and justifiable. Perpetual resistance to bad customs was good. Thinking for oneself was good. Being kind and generous were good. But goodness had to be subject to tests. She endlessly interrogated her own actions and those of others, setting high bars for both.
Back in Uganda, our old homeland, after giving money to a beggar, she would question herself. Was that just an easy way to self-gratification? Why hadn’t she asked the man about his life? Or bought him a blanket? After moving to London in 1972 and until she died at the age of eighty-two, Jena donated some pounds from her supplementary pension to the Oxfam shop near her because she had known penury and endured its corrosive effects on the body, mind, and soul. A picture of Bob Geldof was up on a wall in her little sitting room. This white pop singer, believed my mum, was a demigod of virtue because he cared about starving Africans. We disagreed about that.
I remember how hard Jena worked when I was growing up. My father, Kassam, was brilliant but irresponsible. She did three jobs to support her son and two daughters but resisted praise: ‘All mothers, even dog mothers, do what they have to for their young ones. Nothing special’. Kassam did not let her wear make up. She acquiesced. But when he tried to stop me wearing lipstick as a teenager, she became a tigress and sided with me: ‘ I did it to make you happy. It was my choice. You were thirty-three, I, a much younger wife. I knew that made you anxious and jealous. But you do not have the right to make my daughter obey you.’ And, although she gave up lipstick, rouge and kohl after her wedding day, she wore so much alluring perfume that market traders used to call her ‘mama attar’. Subversion, in her book, was, at times, the way good prevailed over tyranny. Such women are the unrecognised caretakers of human dignity and integrity the world over.
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