In Memoriam: Shyamala Mahler (1934-2015)

I knew Shyamala for 43 years, years that went by much too quickly.  It is hard to come to terms with the fact that for the x number of years I have left,  there will be no new memories of my sister-in-law; the old memories will remain within, however, as long as I live.  As part of this gathering to celebrate Shyamala's life, I would like to share some of them with you today.

During those nearly four and a half decades,  we were together, along with other family members, on many occasions.  Thanksgiving was often celebrated at her house, Christmas as well.  For the last decade or so, my wife and I have hosted an annual "house music" party at our house to celebrate autumn.  She was there for every one, except, alas, the last one.  We often shared each other's company, along with other family members, on trips.  We traveled through Peru together, and most recently, last February, we were in India; we traveled to Kerala, where she was born.  My wife, son and I also had an unforgettable stay with Walt and Shyamala when they were in Africa, two decades ago.  There were many, many other visits arranged just for the fun of being together.

Shyamala was not one of those proverbial in-laws that one tolerates once a year at the Thanksgiving table with the help of stuffing one's mouth with, well, stuffing.  Shyamala made you wish that Thanksgiving occurred every day of the year.

This photo was taken during a family gathering at Shyam and Walt's house.  To the left is Nirmala, next to her is Romila.

I will now relate a few anecdotes that highlight Shyamala's winsome personality.  Nirmala, her sister and my wife, and/or I witnessed all of them.  These are personal views; others might have seen her somewhat differently, but certainly not radically differently.  I will then sum things up, and end with just what you would expect from a poet, a poem.

As I said, I knew Shyamala for the past 43 years, which means I didn't know her for nearly four decades before our first encounter.  I'd like to relate one incident from that period.  Shyamala was, as I've been told, very different when she was growing up.  She was very assertive and self-assured.  She was very career-oriented as well.  She believed women should have a career first, and then--only if they felt it was really necessary--get married.  In short, Shyamala was a proto-feminist in India.  Shyamala remained Shyamala, but her priorities changed when she finally reached her goal of settling in the West.  Let us call the Indian Shyamala whom I didn't know Shymala A and the American one I knew and loved as Shymala B.

Shymala A was, hands down, the most Western-oriented, and later the most Westernized member of all her siblings.  Both Shyamala A and well-traveled Shyamala B had a very adventurous streak; as a young girl growing up in India, however, America, the land most likely able to make her proto-feminist dreams a reality, was her goal from the outset.  Her father, a good man and an absolutely incorruptible policeman--rare in those days as well as in ours--had different priorities.  He decided, God bless him, that his girls should take music lessons, Indian music lessons.  In those days when your father said you're going to take music lessons, well, you're going to take music lessons.  One day, when Shyam, (Walt, her husband, called her by that name), was about sixteen, the music master appeared.  I imagine him as a man in his fifties, dressed entirely in white.  I imagine him to be like the Earth: if you dig down deep enough, everything is warm and flowing, but at the surface, things could be cold and stiff as a Baltimore lawn in winter. My wife and she--the two youngest sisters, Mridula and Romila, were too young at the time--were summoned from their play for the first music lesson.  Nirmala wanted to continue playing, but, as one would have expected, dutifully obeyed.  Her elder sister refused.  She told the master that she would only agree to take a lesson if she could call the tune.  And there was the master, aghast, sitting crossed-legged with a veena on his lap, an instrument so adept in accommodating the complex scales and rhythms of carnatic music.  You must teach me to play, she continued, completely unintimidated, Irene Good Night!  Irene Good Night, an um-pah pah-waltz from the Strauss era, is a melody which is just about the most polar opposite to anything carnatic.  (All right, How Much is That Doggy in the Window, is another contender.)  The man, who perhaps needed the rupees and who perhaps said to himself, ennu sayaddu?, (What to do?), proceeded.  Shyamala won.

Now lets fast forward a few decades.  Shyamala is now married.  She had come to America on a scholarship, completed her Ph.D. at Syracuse University where she met, Walter Mahler, the love of her life.  They married and had two children, to whom she was very dedicated until the day she died.  Shyamala A has become Shyamala B--she had become "homely."  That is, in the British meaning of that word, "dedicated to the home."  It is a compliment.  If there was such a thing as a selfie in those days and Shyamala took one, it would be different from frozen solipsisms common today.  I imagine her friend, Aquila, protesting. "How can you call that a selfie when you're not in it?"  Shyamala would then look at the photo of Walt and her two boys and say, "Aquila, that is my selfie!  That's me!"  

Walt soon began a very prominent career with the IMF which entailed prolonged stays abroad.  There was no way to accommodate a two career-family, which was rare in those days anyway. Shyamala did continue to teach--she apparently was a gifted teacher--but only on a short-term basis.  Her career had become her home.  Mind you, this was a conscious decision.  I do not mean to imply that Shyamala B was in any way inferior to Shyamala A.  To the contrary.

One of my first memories of Shyamala took place just about forty-two years ago from today.  Walt and Shyam were living in an apartment in Vienna, Virginia, at the time.  Beaming with pride, she led my wife Nirmala and me to a bedroom, where, Michael, her second son, barely three weeks old, lay fast asleep.  She was so happy!  Well, it's not rare that mothers are proud of their newborns; what came next was a good example of how Shyamala could multi-task and keep calm.  Roger, the older son, wasn't even three years old, and understandably jealous.  He became a little jihadist, wielding his bottle instead of a grenade.  I ducked just in time; the bottle hit the wall; milk splattered.  Shyamala, perfectly calm, put Michael back in the crib, and very gently said to her eldest, "No Roger, that's not nice!"  She held both his hand and his attention by showing him a picture book.  As infants are wont to do, Michael began to fuss in the adjoining room.  Shyamala, without missing a beat, told Roger that 'Aunty (my wife) wants to show you something--I'll be right back.'  It isn't easy managing a newborn and a toddler simultaneously; Shyamala, was already a pro.

Let's fast-forward about a year and a half.  Walt was out of the country on assignment; Shyamala and her children stayed a few days with us in New York City.  After a long and lovely walk in Central Park, we began to head back to the apartment on W 59th street where my wife and I lived.  I remember pushing Mike, who sat in his stroller with a completely self-absorbed expression on his face.  He reminded me of a little physicist contemplating the splendors of an inner cosmos,  Roger, in contrast,  was like a little comet orbiting the world so fast that it was able to chase its own tail.  Almost home, Roger announced that he wanted to ride on the subway.  My wife and I were tired; I said, "Good idea!  Maybe tomorrow..."  Shayamal didn't let me complete the sentence.  Ever the indulgent mother, she thought it was a great idea.  So we took a subway ride for a few stops and then came back.  On the way home, Roger was energetic as ever.  As kids of his age often do, Roger was testing parental limits.  He would run way ahead but always stopped at the corner until we arrived.  As we approached the apartment, Roger ran right inside and onto the elevator.  As we ran toward him, Roger had a broad smile on his face which, translated into English, said something like this: "Look how independent I am! I arrived first!"  Then the elevator door closed before we could reach him.  I will never forget  how quickly his expression turned from sheer delight to sheer terror.  I must have looked frightened as well.  I remember thinking, "He might be kidnapped!"  Shyamala calmed me down immediately with the following words, "Whatever goes up must come down.  Let's wait right here."  The elevator went up many stories and then, sure enough, came down.  The door opened and revealed a kindly lady toting a sniffling child that immediately ran to his mother.  Shyamala was probably upset as well, but she sure didn't show it.  She smiled, as if her son had just come off a kiddie ride at an amusement part.  That was Shyamala; she held things together, she kept things calm.

Now let's fast-forward several years.  It is now 1993.  My wife, my son and I are visiting Shyam, Walt and their son in Africa, where Walt was on an IMF assignment.  Shyam had invited us to stay with them for a week on our way to India; we accepted gladly.  They were staying in a huge house near Nairobi with an even huger, lovingly maintained garden.  Walt soon took us on a safari through Masai Mara, the large preserve that takes up many square miles of Kenya and Tanzania.  It was an unforgettable experience.  We were lucky enough to witness the annual wildebeest migration; thousands of them surrounded our jeep as we proceeded.  We saw crocodiles waiting for them in the river like white cops waiting for black jaywalkers.  (Sorry--I had to get that in.)  We saw several astonished wildebeests succumb to saurian jaws. Other animals astonished us as well. (If you've ever seen giraffes in love, you will never forget it.  The female looks completely uninterested.  She nibbles a few leaves, walks on a bit and stops.  Then the male, who looks just as uninterested--it's hard to  detect passion on a face of a giraffe--keeps the same gap between them by walking toward her. This goes on and on and on.)

The city folks among us were deeply moved by this unforgettable experience. The world had become a zoo in which we humans were nothing more than a minor exhibit.  This is where we evolved, I remember telling myself.

Shyamala was an excellent cicerone; she loved nature and knew the names and habits of most of the animals and birds.  If there was something interesting to be seen she was like one of those kids who could find Waldo way before you could.  At the end of the day, we stood on a hill overlooking a vast plain with Mt. Kilimanjaro in the distance.  "Look," Shyamala quietly exclaimed, pointing to a baobab tree in the distance.  She had spotted a leopard with a freshly killed antelope on one of the branches.  This is an extremely rare sight.  Shyamla had sharpened our vision.  Soon one of us glimpsed something moving behind bushes in the distance.  "See that little circle bobbing up and down, Shyamala?  What is that?"  "That," she replied, "is the head of a tourist!"  Our eyes just couldn't compete.

I want to point out now another trait of Shyamala's personality which this incident illustrates.  She didn't laugh at us, she laughed with us.  In all the 43 years that I knew her, I never heard Shyamala say or saw her do anything that could be modified iby the adjective, "mean."  This is extraordinary.  In all my seventy years, I can count all the people I know who never said or did anything mean on one hand--provided that that hand had no fingers. 

This photo was taken during our trip to India in February, 2015. These were the six surving siblings at that time.  From the left are Shyamala, Vimala, Rajagopalan, Romila, Nirmala and Mridula (1944-2015).  Mriduala passed away a few weeks after Shyamala.

Yes, Shyamala loved nature and science.  I'm told she wanted to study science.  Unfortunately, her father died when she was getting ready for college.  There were now financial problems.  She had to depend on a scholarship, and could not find one in the field she desired.  That's how she came to study political science.  To my knowledge, she never regretted that decision.  That's how Shyamala was; she would take the cards Fate dealt her, then proceed to beat him at his own game.

Love for nature and science, however, lasted her entire life. The American wing of the family, three sisters, their husbands and their children usually celebrated--in a very low-key way--Christmas at Shyam's.  I never had to think much about what to give her.  It was easy--a book on science, often on the subject of cosmology.  Not too long ago, I gave her The Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss, which she very much appreciated.  She was an avid fan of the Cosmos series--both the Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson versions.  We often talked about science together.  I especially recall one occasion of our shared interest.  Every year, I send a New Years card that includes one of my poems.  A few years ago, I included a poem, inspired by a poem by a Nobel-prize-winning Polish poet; it had several references to cosmology.  When I walked into her house at Christmas that year, she greeted me with a big smile.  She loved the poem, she told me.  I will never forget her enthusiasm; it was that palpable. The poem mentioned Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, that just might contain life.  She knew all about it.  Everyone knows that the universe is expanding and that the galaxies are hurtling away from each other.  There are notable exceptions, however.  Andromeda, the Milky Ways neighbor, is actually hurtling toward us--at a distance of 2.2 million light-years it's going to take a lot of hurtling to reach our galaxy, billions of years, in fact.  It's approaching us because it is part of the so-called local group, our galactic neighbors, in which there is more than enough matter, and hence more than enough gravity to overcome, lambda, the expansive force of the vacuum.  She knew all this.  She would have been a good scientist.

Shyamala had remarkable will power as well.  She had diabetes for many years.  She refused to take medicine and treated the diabetes with a very, very strict diet and exercise regimen. She had a lot of stamina as well.  She walked about two hours or so a day right up to the very end.  During family visits to Walt and Shyam's home in Virginia, Shyam and I would inevitably suggest a long walk through the neighborhood.  Shyamala always accommodated the rest of us, some of whom were less walk-happy than she was, by offerring to lead us on a two-hour, a one-hour or a half-hour walk. We usually opted for the one-hour walk.   

In India a few years ago, another sister-in-law noticed that Nirmala and I walk with a brisk gait.  "Slow down," she told us, "you're older now!"  Which sister-in-law do you think is our role model here?  If Shyamala ever looks down on Nirmala and me from on high--I hope she does--she would frequently find us at the gym.

We've seen that Shyamala was a calming influence on those around her.  She was, to put it mildly, not egotistical.  She was dedicated to family.  She was always kind and never jealous or envious.  In short, she accepted life as it is. This is very hard to do.  What was her secret?  Was there an Eastern core deep beneath the Western surface of the planet, always revolving around her husband and two sons, that was Shyamala?  I think there was.

She reminds me of the novels of Haruki Murakami.  Everything on the surface is very Westernized.  One of the characters hums a Rossini tune as he lands in Hamburg.  One owns a jazz club in Tokyo.  The novels often depict a brilliant young,  troubled woman--if she didn't have difficulties there would be no novel.  Everything is Westernized on the surface.  But the novels are very, very Japanese as well.  The symbol that Murakami uses to convey this is wells.  People disappear into them.  The wells represent the universe within. Traveling inside oneself is the traditional Eastern way of getting around.

I think Shyamala made that journey, although we never talked about it.  She never went to temples; she never liked carnatic music, etc.--as mentioned earlier, she was the most Westernized member of the family.  But the presence of a wise, deep spirituality reached  the surface occasionally, much as water occasionally breaks through, after a ten mile journey, to the surface on Enceladus.  My third eye always noticed.  She kept a little shrine to Ganesh in her kitchen.  I'm told that when a problem arose that worried her, she contacted her very religious older sister and requested that she arrange a puja on her behalf.  But these are superficial things; devotion to a personal god is that Hindus bhakti.  What about jnana, the visceral knowledge of the interconnectedness of all things?  This is the very height of Hinduism; it is called advaita, non-duality.  I am convinced that Shyamala had an intuitive knowledge of this, which informed just about everything she did.  

At the end of her life, my sister-in-law became more quiet.  She didn't hear well; her memory was beginning to fail.  Recently, I sometimes would sit next to her during a family gathering.  She wouldn't say much; neither would I.  As the great Hindu sage, Ramana Marashi said, after Somerset Maugham visited him and didn't say a word for the entire time he was in the sage's presence, "Silence is also conversation."

On the day of her death, I wrote a poem dedicated to her, which can be interpreted as a silent conversation between us.  I am not going to read it.  Instead, I will close with a poet much better than I, Walt Whitman.  Just like Shyamala, Whitman loved the dynamism of the West; his poems are filled with optimistic portraits of Americans from all classes and races. His world-view, or, better said, his cosmic view, comes closer to that of advaita than that of any other American poet I know.  The poem is the last section of "Song of Myself."  Imagine that a synthesis of Shyamala A and Shyamala B is doing the narrating.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest as true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dust.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow as the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know what I am or mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.


I look forward to many silent conversations with you, Shyamala.  I regret that our conversations will no longer contain gestures and words.  Rest in peace, dear sister-in-law, we will miss you very much.