US Elections 2024: What would my mother say?

I was born in Kerala, during an extended stay in India by my parents to get medical care for my father. My grandmother offered to care for me for a few months to allow my mother time to regain her strength after childbirth. But my mother , Gladys Vaz Morais insisted on making the voyage back to Malaya, babe in her arms, and her three other children in tow. Thank goodness!

On this ninth anniversary of my mother’s return to the heavens from whence she came, I find myself wondering what she would make of the elections in my country of adoption this year. I remember my mother always being very interested in the political news of the day. Perhaps it was in part the result of being married to an up-and-coming journalist who reported on the news of the day and brought the discussion of the issues he covered home to her. I did my homework at the dining table after dinner, half-tuned to fragments of my parents’ spirited conversations in the living room. They talked very animatedly about what was happening in India, the country she left as a young bride to make a home with my father in then British Malaya and about what was going on in independent Malaysia. They talked about British and American leaders. About the heroes of India’s fight for independence. She knew what it was to survive through difficult times. I listened, rapt, to her stories of life during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya, the anxiety of seeing her husband go off to work in an office where he had to look out on a severed human head mounted on a pole, a warning to be careful about what he published. She spoke of nights when he slept in the home of this friend, or that, to avoid a possible late night arrest by the Japanese authorities. She spoke of friends and relatives who had lost their lives during the war. Of people who had been sent to internment camps and struggled to stay alive. Of those who were put to work on the infamous Death Railway and never came back. Of her midwife, Sybil Kathigasu, who helped those injured in the resistance to the Japanese get medical care from her husband, a doctor, at great risk to their own safety. She remembered the horror of the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of them on the birthday of my second oldest brother. She spoke of dreaming up little ways to earn extra money to help with household expenses during the war. Through all of those difficult years, she never stopped caring for her growing family and a fairly constant stream of relatives who came to stay, some for days, others for months or years.

My mother’s legacy was one of constant kindness.

I know I am a political junkie in part because of what I absorbed from her and my father.

She would be aghast that American voters failed to elect a highly qualified woman, a former Attorney General and a sitting Vice President when the other option was a twice impeached former President, convicted of multiple crimes, who incited an insurrection and bragged about getting rid of a long entrenched right for a woman to make decisions about her body. It would be especially hard for her to fathom given that female Prime Ministers have won election multiple times in India, Sri Lanka and many other Asian, African, South American and European countries.

My mother wore beautiful saris and cooked the finest Indian food I have ever eaten anywhere. Americans looking at her would consider her “traditional.” And she was, in the best of ways. I also knew her to be deeply feminist in her views and her aspirations for her daughters. The older I grow, the more I realize how much I learned from her. One of those lessons was to not be afraid when faced with daunting tasks. She would send us off saying with confidence and faith, “Just go. Do it. All will be well..” And she was usually right.

So, in this moment, as I remember how fortunate I was to have her for my mother, I will do as she instructed us so many times: go forward with faith and confidence, tackling our challenges with hard work, confident that all will be well. Above all, she said, be kind. So, on this anniversary of her passing, in this most difficult week, I resolve once again to do just that. I can think of no better way to honor her. And no better way to face this moment.