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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
There are six large bins in my basement labelled “Queenie.” This is all I have left of my mum. I haven’t opened them for 22 years, nor have I watched the videos I taped of her talking for hours, telling her stories, in the weeks before she succumbed to ovarian cancer. She was just 70. I was in my 30s. It was a rip-off of epic proportions. She was a good mother – not a perfect one – but she did her best, never wavered. I always knew she’d take a bullet for me, which counted for a lot – everything in fact. It was a profound loss.
After she died, we had just weeks to clear out her apartment. It was no easy task – for all the emotional reasons, to be sure, but also because my mother kept everything. It was like going through an archive, not just of the life I’d known with her, but of her early life in Hyderabad, too. Before leaving for Canada, she’d shipped a steamer trunk containing her most cherished possessions. It was her connection to the past and we had to go through that as well.
Whatever I couldn’t part with, all the things that defined her for me, I loaded into bins and put away. As I stare at them now, I wonder how an extraordinary life can be crystallized into keepsakes and mementoes? If I were to open them, would their contents capture her essence and do justice to her story?
She was born in India in 1927. Her family was Anglo-Indian, a byproduct of colonization, her name a nod to the British Royal princess who’d been born the year prior and would be Queen some day. She was proud of her name and loved the Monarchy despite hating the British Raj and what it did to India.
Her young mother died giving birth, so she was sent to be nursed by an aunt who’d just had a child. She lived there like an orphan for 20 years, till her beloved dad died, making it official. Despite her beauty and intellect, she was not marriage material – a woman living in a hostel, with no parents or dowry, and with English blood running through her Indian veins. At 30, she married the first man who asked, well past her prime by Indian standards. It turned out she didn’t know what she was getting into.
Desperate to escape his Brahmin roots, my father had secret plans to go abroad and find his fortune. He chose Canada, changed his name, converted to Catholicism and took full advantage of his new wife’s British sensibilities. Not long after we arrived, he divorced her and left.
It was difficult, but she was resilient, had a zest for life and an interest in the world around her. Her heart was in India but she became a proud Canadian. She loved politics and space exploration, would have gone to the moon if she could. She worked hard, continuously learning, adapting and growing. She liked to have fun and cultivated many lasting friendships once here. Elegant on a shoestring, she was always well-dressed. And if there was one passion in her life, it was dancing. My mother was a sucker for ballroom. For most of my childhood, she went out every weekend and danced up a storm.
I loved it when she’d open her trunk and show us her precious cargo – a sandalwood box containing her father’s cotton handkerchiefs, his Ayurvedic journals, his pocket watch; British sweet tins filled with jewels and gold; her simple wedding gown; an album full of old photos and newsclips about the last Nizam, Gandhi’s peaceful protests and the Queen’s coronation.
For so long, I avoided sifting through her things, not wanting to decide what to keep, what to let go – not wanting to whittle her away. Besides the contents of her trunk, I have blankets she crocheted for me, the cracked bundt pan she used for the only cake she ever baked, her trusty chapati bowl, her dance dresses and well-worn stilettos, her Jimmy Cliff and Lata Mangeshkar albums, her silk saris, her beat-up tea kettle. Nothing of great value, except sentimental.
The fact is, I haven’t needed any of these things to evoke her memory. I think of her daily – when I hear her favourite songs, when I bake her sour cream coffee cake or share her recipe, when I see her in my daughters’ faces, when I connect with family in India and when people tell me how much I remind them of her. I, too, am proud of her name, not because it was bestowed in honour of the Queen, but because it suited her. Because she herself was regal and left a rich living legacy.
I’ve decided to go through everything and save just a few treasures. I’m okay if my kids don’t keep them when I’m gone. I’ve finally converted the videos, and, although my mum has always been with me, I will watch them this Mother’s Day and let her speak to me again.
Shirley Phillips lives in Toronto.