There is a climactic moment in the life of the dying protagonist Nirmala, titular figure of Hindi writer Premchand’s novel, when she hands over her newborn girl to her sister-in-law. Nirmala requests the matron to feel free to either keep the girl unmarried, poison her or mete out any other treatment, except never to palm her off to an unfit groom. Nirmala’s wish for her daughter’s happiness was beautifully captured in Mannu Bhandari’s screenplay, which made way for the 1987 tele-serial Nirmala. Bhandari’s empathy for the suffering mother, who was once married off to a much older man, showed in the live-wire dialogues, which remain etched in my consciousness. I found a powerful expression of mother’s love in Bhandari’s Nirmala. At an earlier point in 1981, I had read Aapka Bunty, another Bhandari creation that tested the boundaries of a mother-son bond. But my young mind hadn’t registered the nuanced portrayal of the mother.  

That’s precisely why I am grateful to author and film-critic Maithili Rao for making me privy to a new Motherhood anthology that includes Mannu Bhandari’s translated essay Girl on The Stairs, a tribute to her stoic, mute and docile mother whom the author loves to the core, but cannot place as a role model. Bhandari’s clear-eyed assessment of a traditional mother evokes respect. Not only is she angry about a woman who was devoted to her husband and mother-in-law to a fault, she also disapproves of her social reformer-father who was blind to the wife’s suffering. In one of her TV interviews, excerpted in the anthology, Bhandari says that real-life docile women impacted her writing. Since she found fewer women rocking the boat, she couldn’t possibly create braver versions in her stories. Her honesty is disarming.