Lessons on living from Gauri

Time of India

21-04-2025

Monidipa is a freelance writer and blogger for sundry clients. Monidipa has been an advertising professional for over two decades with long stints as Creative Director of agencies like JWT and Maa Bozell in Kolkata, Mumbai and Bangalore. Her professional experience includes developing campaigns for products across media and across categories, including some iconic brands like Bata, ITC, VIP Luggage, Air India and more. She also moonlighted as a food critic with Femina, speechwriter for corporate honchos and a tarot reader. Currently, she is immersed in yoga, heritage tours, good wine and daydreams of being an author. LESS ... MORE
Gauri is my go-to girl for household matters of all kinds ranging from clean floors to washed utensils or watered plants. She is 'the help' balancing her work schedule between several apartments in the gated community where I live. She is a single mother of grown up children who have been to English medium schools and colleges and have 'office jobs' though she herself remains illiterate. But what she lacks in education , Gauri makes up for with her awareness of current affairs picked up from television news channels, her intuitive grasp of financial investments, her common sense and her general life views flowing out of a natural joie de vivre. When I am stressed out with a particular work or life problem , Gauri walks in and never fails to cheer me up with her unsolicited stress management tips – drink some ice cold Coke, put on lipstick, sleep for an hour ! If I say the heat of the summer is killing me, there is again unsolicited advice- go out and walk around the block under the blazing sun and then come home to find out how cool it really is! I often tell her to stop talking and finish her work fast but she grins back and says that work becomes fun if we chat sometimes and that I should also pick up the phone and talk to my friends more often.
For the past few weeks however, Gauri has been rather quiet for she was saddled with a whole lot of problems herself – a loan for her son's scooter that needed to be repaid , the need to find a new place to rent with a lower deposit , because she had lost a couple of jobs since the families she worked for were moving out, the urgency to pay for the ongoing litigation to get her due share of her late husband's property . She has been coming to work and finishing the chores ,with only a ghost of her usual bright smile and no sound of her playful banter. But it all changed yesterday . She had taken leave the day before to go to a temple where divine powers were believed to remove obstacles and make life smoother for devotees.
I saw her smiling and casually said 'Hope your problems are going to be solved now that you visited your favorite temple .' She grinned and answered. ' Didi, while I was praying I realized that problems will come because it is our karma and since we are human beings, we can use our brains to find a solution. And then when I was coming to work early in the morning , I saw the trees and flowers outside your house and thought that in my next life , I want to be born as a plant, a beautiful flowering tree that does not have to worry about loans or rent. I will pray that I somehow get through this life and then become a plant that does not long for ac in summer and sweaters in winter but simply lets nature take care of things. And my flowers would make everyone happy even after they fell down from the plant because they look pretty even when they are dead.' I listened and thought for a while – a great metaphor for living in sync with the rhythm of nature, secure in the quiet joy of knowing that life is beautiful . As is death.
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