I call her Badibai—the elder mother. It is a heavy title, perhaps, for a woman who is my sister, but from the moment I opened my eyes to the world, her affection has been so encompassing that the name simply stuck, fitting her as naturally as a well-worn cotton sari.

She is eighty-three now. But if you ask me, the story really begins in the dusty, sun-baked town of Barsi on February 26, 1942. She arrived after a delivery so prolonged and agonizing that it seemed she was reluctant to enter this complicated world at all. Six months later, the great Quit India movement erupted in our own Wardha, but in our household, the revolution was of a quieter, domestic sort.

The Practical Scholar

In the 1950s, education for girls was a delicate negotiation between progress and tradition. Bhaiji, our father, was a man of strict principles. When he realized that continuing in a Hindi medium school would mean sending his daughter to a co-educational school where boys and girls sat in the same room, he balked. And so, Badibai was marched off to the Kesrimal Kanya Shala, a Marathi medium school.

It was here that a peculiar truth about her nature emerged. She was a wizard at Arithmetic—give her a ledger, a list of expenses, or a bank balance, and she would tally it with the precision of a seasoned accountant. But Algebra? That was a foreign country. When the board exams arrived, the abstract dance of ‘X’ and ‘Y’ betrayed her. She scored a perfect twenty in Arithmetic, but Algebra was her undoing, and she failed to clear the matriculation.

It was a failure that, in the grand tapestry of life, mattered very little. While Bhaiji scolded her for spoiling her eyesight over embroidery, she quietly became a master of the needle, stitching saris with a determination that said more than words ever could.

A Comedy of Errors

By 1960, the inevitable business of marriage descended upon the house. Suitcase after suitcase of hopeful grooms arrived, and Badibai, tired of being paraded like a prize exhibit, decided to adopt a policy of ruthless honesty. When the Singhis from Indore arrived, they asked the standard question: “How much have you studied?”.

Badibai didn’t look down. She didn’t fidget. She simply said, “Matric fail”.

It was the sort of blunt truth that usually sinks a proposal. Instead, it charmed them. They saw integrity where others might have seen failure, and the engagement was fixed. But the gods of comedy were not done with us yet.

The groom, Narsingdasji—my Jijaji—was a young man with a taste for literature and music who had not yet seen the girl he was to marry. When his train passed through Wardha, Badibai went to the station to garland him. As the train hissed to a halt and she stepped forward, panic set in for the young man. He turned to his companions, his voice rising over the station clamor: “How can I marry a girl who looks like a mother of three children?”.

He had mistaken his future mother-in-law for his bride!. It took a flurry of letters to calm him down, and the wedding proceeded under Bhaiji’s strict management—fewer than fifty guests, served on silver platters to the gentle notes of a shehnai.

The Grind of Bhopal

Marriage took Badibai from the thick, comforting rotis of Wardha to the wafer-thin rotis of Indore. It was a culture shock, akin to moving from Mars to Venus. By 1961, she was in Bhopal, living in a sprawling joint family house where the romance of youth met the hard stone of reality.

She was a teenager, yet she worked from four in the morning until eleven at night, cooking for twenty people. She was perpetually sleep-deprived, her small frame carrying the weight of the entire household, yet she never sent a word of complaint back to us. There is a story from those days that breaks my heart. Traveling once without a valid ticket due to a mix-up, she was ordered off the train at Itarsi. Terrified and penniless on the platform, she was saved only by a kind Ticket Examiner who guided her to an unreserved coach—a small mercy in a hard time.

The Four A’s

Life eventually gave her her own kingdom—a small, L-shaped flat in Kayasthpura. Here, she raised her “Four A’s”: Archana, Anand, Aalok, and Amit. She was fierce about their education, saving every paisa while Jijaji insisted on sending them to the best schools.

Anand, her eldest son, was a prodigy of a different mold. When a priest once asked about his hobbies, he didn’t say “Maths”—he insisted it was “Sums”. He possessed a restless energy, cycling ten kilometers daily just to race—and often beat—the school bus. Though circumstances forced him to leave formal education before he could grasp a college degree, he did not need a piece of paper to prove his worth. Relying on sheer grit and out-of-the-box thinking, he turned his passion into iron and steel, building Anand Metal Works—his foundry—into a valuable kingdom of his own.

And then there was Aalok. In a twist of fate that seems lifted from a mythological tale, he was adopted by Jijaji’s elder brother. Badibai, tormented by the very thought of parting with her son, refused to eat for a week. But in our families, the call of duty often drowns out the voice of emotion, and she eventually accepted the path laid out for him. Although Aalok moved to Indore decades ago, the distance has done nothing to sever the invisible thread binding him to Bhopal. He remains intimately woven into the fabric of the family, enjoying a wonderful, raucous camaraderie with the other three ‘As’—Archana, Anand, and Amit.

Every summer, the house in Wardha would swell with the arrival of the entire Singhi and Chandak clans. But the true star of these gatherings was six-year-old Archana. We would parade her before every visitor, urging her to recite Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. To the rest of the world, it was a simple nursery rhyme; but to us, hearing this small girl navigate the Queen’s English, our collective chest would swell with a pride that no university degree could match.

And then there was Amit. His heart was originally set on the stethoscope; he desperately wanted to be a doctor. But life, with its peculiar sense of humor, steered him reluctantly towards ledgers and balance sheets. Yet, once submerged in the world of Commerce, he took to it like a fish to water. He didn’t just swim; he conquered. Gathering degrees like trophies—CA, CS, ICWAI—he eventually became a “Doctor” after all, earning a PhD, and even completed the circle by marrying a medical doctor, Pratibha. Today, he stands as a Chartered Accountant and businessman whose success makes the whole family beam with pride.

The Shadow in Sevagram

It was the summer of 1975 when the darkness came. Following a surgery, Badibai developed severe sepsis, wasting away in a hospital room in Sevagram for twenty-six days. The air was thick with the unspoken fear of the inevitable. I was a third year medical student, studying at Nagpur then, and Pushpa Jiji and I were with her all through the hospital days. 

One evening, Jijaji thought that Badibai was too serious to last. Convinced these were her final moments, he began to recite the Bhagavad Gita. Badibai’s eyes snapped open. The fire that had sustained her through the long years of struggle flared up. “Stop this,” she hissed, her voice weak but furious. “I am not dying!”.

But outside the room, the fear lingered. Jijaji turned to me, his face wet with tears. “SP Babu,” he said, trembling, “our kids are small. We need to live just four or five years more. Just that much.”. Those words—our kids are small—were a plea to the universe. And perhaps the universe listened, for she did not die. She pulled herself back from the brink, fueled by the sheer necessity of being a mother. Amit still remembers this story although at that time he was just 4 year old. 

The Night of the Gas

Badibai has looked history in the eye more than once. It was the fateful midnight of December 1984. The family lived on Chhola Road, where the Union Carbide plant loomed as an immediate neighbor.

The air turned heavy and stinging. It was Anand who first sensed the invisible malice. There was no time for debate. In a blur of panic, they piled into the car, the engine’s roar the only sound of hope in a choking city. They fled with such haste that the front door was left unlocked—a small detail when life hung in the balance. They found sanctuary with us in Wardha, a miraculous escape owed entirely to Anand’s foresight. Even today, they can still feel the chill of that midnight when they outran death.

Life at Shail Shikhar

These days, the storms have passed. Badibai divides her time between the bustle of Indore and the familiar quiet of Bhopal. In Bhopal, she reigns over Shail Shikhar, the house built with such hope in the early nineties.

Her day begins with a ritual that speaks of sixty-five years of companionship. In the quiet corner of their bedroom, equipped with a small stove and fridge, Jijaji transforms into a culinary artist. He does not simply stir a pot; he performs a classical North Indian symphony. With the wrist-flick of a seasoned chaiwalla yet the dignity of a royal butler, he lifts the vessel high, letting the hot stream plunge into the cup below. He repeats this—up and down, a cascading amber arch—until a rich, velvety froth rises to the top, imparting a taste that would make a seven-star chef hang his head in defeat.

She loves to stay active, her hands busy chopping vegetables in the kitchen. She is a woman of precision, knowing her medical readings better than any doctor. She eats like a bird—hardly a chapati and some daal—yet she houses an infinite reserve of energy. She drifts between the homes of Anand and Amit like a gentle breeze, scanning the horizon for the next wedding, waiting eagerly to welcome a new damaad or bahu.

A Winter Morning Record

And then, there is the pride of a mother. In December 2025, on a shivering morning in Indore, her son Aalok achieved something extraordinary. Under the banner of the ‘Mitasha Foundation’—a name that beautifully braids ‘Mit’ (friend) with ‘Asha’ (hope), and coincidentally, her own name—he gathered over six thousand people.

They walked five kilometers in the biting cold to support the fight against anemia and to pledge organ donation. As Badibai watched the sea of people flow from Nehru Stadium to Palasia Square, earning her son a world record, her chest swelled. The boy who was once adopted away had returned to give something back to the whole city.

The Family Circle

Today, Badibai finds herself the center of a bustling universe. The small family that started in Bhopal has blossomed into a formidable clan—Archana and Suresh, Anand and Kirti, Aalok and Sumita, Amit and Pratibha. And then there is the chorus of grandchildren—Pratiksha, Aaditya, Nikita, Nitisha, Kritika, and Tanush.

Their relationship with her is refreshing; it lacks stiff formality. They joke with her, tease her with easy familiarity, and conspire to take her down memory lane, making her laugh over stories from a different era. To the world, she is the elder mother, but to this lively group, she is simply, and affectionately, their Dadi.

So, this is the journey of our Chhoti si Asha. Born in Barsi, raised in the lanes of Marwadi Mohalla, and schooled at Kesrimal Kanya Shala, she eventually carried her world to Bhopal. From the small flat in Kayasthpura and the foundry on Chhola Road to the serenity of the home overlooking the Karbala lake, she has gathered a lifetime of stories. She is a living library of memories, and we, her family, are all very eager to listen.