# (7) 30 Nov 2010, 05:56PM GMT+5:30: Charity:
Today my mom again made me some churrimurri -- a light snack mix of puffed rice, freshly grated carrot, diced onion, masala, etc., etc. It's delicious. As we ate she said it reminded her of my dad, and told me --
My dad grew up very poor. His dad made five rupees a month as an electrician (this is in the 1930s and 1940s). Every day the churrimurri guy went by with his cart and gave everyone in his family a serving. He never asked them for money. They gave him a rupee a month. And every night, the restaurant near them gave them some leftover soup.
When my dad was 20, in engineering college, staying in a free room by the grace of someone's charity, he knew seven families who would give him some dinner, so he had a set schedule to visit each of them on different nights of the week. Five of them just gave him a helping of whatever the family was having. Two gave him food that had gone off, stuff they wouldn't eat.
One day he was leaving one of those latter houses. His stomach seized up. He vomited. He dragged himself to his room and lay down. He couldn't get up.
He didn't eat for three days.
A friend of his came by on the third day and knocked. Dad was too weak to get up and open the door, so his friend got a pole so he could go around to the open window and poke the pole through to open the door. He got Dad a meal, and gave him his voucher for a month's worth of meals at his dorm...
I looked at my churrimurri, suddenly ill.
I will be writing more about how hard my mom and dad worked to get out of poverty, to get the financial power to help people and pay forward the generosity they'd received. Right now I just feel ill with unearned privilege.
- Comments:
Posted by Susie at 30 Nov 2010, 10:13AM
Wow. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by Debbie Notkin at 30 Nov 2010, 10:51AM
"It's the same the whole world over."My grandfather came to the U.S. as a young adult and worked on the docks. He was making good money for a working man of that time, but he was saving almost all of it to send home to Russia to bring more family here. So on the weekends, he went to his aunts for dinner. They would say, "Louie, are you hungry?" and he would say, "I could eat."It took them a long time to figure out that he was doing this at every aunt's house (I think there were four) and not eating hardly at all during the week. "I could eat" is household jargon around here, and I always hear echoes of poverty and sacrifice when we use it in much lighter ways.Thanks for sharing your family story. Does it make me a bad person that now I want to taste churrimurri?
Posted by Camille at 30 Nov 2010, 01:23PM
On the other hand you can (and have) shown a high level of respect for your parents level of accomplishment. By your own accounts, it is clear that you are the product of so much of their hard work. They wanted you to be where you were at that moment eating as much churrimurri as your heart desired. So bon appetit and keep on being a good person and don't ever forget what got you where you are!
Posted by chris. at 30 Nov 2010, 06:38PM
Thank you for this, Sumana. Your posts are always so introspective and analytical that i'm really looking forward to how you approach your family's history.
Posted by Fafner at 30 Nov 2010, 08:25PM
This is an incredible story. Thank you for writing it.
Posted by Mel Chua at 01 Dec 2010, 10:00AM
I read your story, and thought of my grandfather denying himself a college education so he could work and put his siblings through university - and then how he put each of his 8 daughters through college and got them visas to the US - so that his grandchildren could be born and educated here, and go to US universities... and then they could do whatever they dreamed of.I'm the first of those grandchildren. My grandfather died two years before I graduated from college.Sometimes I feel the responsibility of living up to the sacrifices of two generations of my family before me - guilty about the privilege I've earned but never asked for. But I think, to some extent, watching me grow up in a free country and have these opportunities and make these choices (which, to some extent, they don't really understand) is the thank-you my family wanted. Sometimes, if you love something, you let it go.
Posted by Sarah at 06 Dec 2010, 03:21AM
Wow. This story is amazing. Also: all privilege is unearned, as is all oppression. Your father got to see you grow up to be a wonderful, brilliant woman. In my own family the crushing poverty is a few generations farther back (and probably of a different order of magnitude), but I don't think any of us who had loving, hard-working parents can ever thank them enough.
