Geetanjali Krishna: A requiem for Amma

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When Amma died last week, I realised I didn't even know what her name had been.

A frail, gentle soul, she died as she had lived "" quietly and alone. She used to say she was in her fifties, but chronic asthma, neglect and widowhood made her appear much older. Her stooped figure was a common sight in our colony, where she and her family had lived and worked for years. I first saw her when she came with her daughter Shashi who cleaned my house. "This is my old mother," said Shashi, "would you mind if she sat here while I worked?" I didn't mind, and so she began coming with Shashi everyday.

Watching her sit patiently in the kitchen waiting for her daughter to finish her chores, I began to wonder why she came everyday. Then Shashi told me that Amma, as I'd taken to calling her, was her cover. "My husband threw me out of the house when I gave birth to our third daughter, but I'm hopeful he'll take me back. He doesn't like the idea of my working "" so I bring my mother along saying she's the one who's working, not I," she explained.

And her mother accompanied her, day after painful day, even when her asthma was really bothering her. "Take her to AIIMS," I advised Shashi, not liking the sound of her cough. There was nothing the matter with her that a strong glass of ginger tea couldn't cure, pooh-poohed Shashi.

Soon after that, Shashi was reunited with her husband and went away, leaving Amma alone. But Amma was too happy for her daughter to complain. She promptly installed her daughter-in-law to take on Shashi's work, and domestic balance at home was easily restored. For a while, Amma stopped coming as her role as a cover was over. So, when I saw her at my doorstep a few weeks later, I knew something was amiss.

"My daughter-in-law couldn't come today," she wheezed, "I've come to work instead," she explained. Her cough was worse than before, I noticed. It was because her daughter-in-law didn't take good care of her, Amma explained. It soon transpired that the daughter-in-law wanted Amma to work in my house, as she had taken up another job.

As the poor lady coughed and wheezed all over my house, I began getting more and more uncomfortable about making her work for me. Eventually I gave her three months' salary and told her gently that she was too sick to work. Maybe she could come back to me once she recovered, I suggested.

This was six months ago. I am ashamed to say I didn't realise that for Amma, getting laid-off was the final nail in her coffin. The money I'd given her soon petered out, and her son and his wife didn't take care of her either. She stopped going to the government clinic and eventually died a lingering death.

Guilt-stricken, I thought about Amma's lonely end. Could I really blame her progeny for neglecting her, when they themselves were fighting to survive? Or was I to blame for disallowing a sick woman to work in my house? There was no doubt that in our own ways we'd all wronged her. But Amma had also been let down by the government's social security net, so porous that she had virtually fallen through it.

The next morning, the papers and TV were full of the stock market's bull run, the Indo-Pak cricket series and the latest Bollywood blockbuster. Amma had died, and the tragedy was that few even noticed she'd gone.