Spinning tales at wheel of a sewing machine
An unexpected pause in our hectic life in the wake of the Covid crisis has resuscitated many of our comatose hobbies to life, and the case of my mom was no exception either. The persistent clank-clunk of the needle clamp on the sewing machine in chorus with the whirring purr of its balance-wheel wafting out from her room up to our ears was a patent proof that she had once again got besotted with one of the last relics of her heydays that she’d brought as dowry.
An unannounced admission into her room revealed that she was occupied with rustling up masks of different colours; improvising them, as if by magic, out of tattered rags of the entire family. Later we learnt, her hubby’s negligence had stirred her into scrimping and saving mode as dad having had lost over a dozen masks had once again made up his mind to purchase a dozen more from the market.
Making hay while the sun shone, her brainy son handed over his jeans to her to stitch a big tear in its seat, recalling the times spent in Mumbai when even getting a simple button sewed back onto his shirt from a tailor never came free of cost. While mom was fixing the loophole in my jeans, I reminded her about one of her goof-ups when she stitched the knees of the newly purchased ripped jeans of my sibling by mistaking the then new fashion rage for manufacturing defect; and eventually earning the sulking frown and moaning protest in return from her elder son. Recalling that long zany episode brought a broad smile as she vividly remembered that in order to compensate for her slip-up, she had to loosen her purse strings and buy a pair of new jeans of the same design and in the same shade to the pacified smile of the sufferer.
The languorous motion of the sewing machine, now old and past its best, took me down memory lane to my childhood days when it was at the peak of its youth, needing far lesser lubrication in maintenance than at present. My elder sibling and I would take turns to hold a hairpin from both sides passed through a bobbin to indulge in the thrill of spooling the thread back onto it. Keeping the balance of the bobbin on the fast-spinning balance-wheel as mom quickly turned the handle was a tough and subtle task at hand far easier said than done. Apparently slipping all the time, the hairpin shaking beyond the permissible limit spelt doom for the holder as the bobbin would go off the wheel and cashing in on the missed opportunity, the other sibling waiting in the wings would get a chance to show his clenching skills to smiling mom, who assumed the role of an unbiased umpire. Some other day, she was busy stitching the frayed edges and seams of the old kurta of my dad with spools of thread of varied colours and a few pair of drawn-off curtains of the home to be mended strewn all around her.
Dating back to the days of childhood, this familiar setting had seemingly rolled forward in perpetuity thus far, pushing my grown-up conscience into unprecedented curiosity to observe her meticulous dexterity at close quarters that I’d had never done previously. The in-depth learning vis-à-vis the nuances of the manual operations came to me as a complete surprise marked with an uncanny sense of fulfilment. To be honest, being at the wheel of mom’s sewing machine was not lesser, by even a degree, in deriving the truckloads of thrilling excitement that used to generate while being at the wheel of dad’s shuttling machine when he taught me driving instructions of the car for the very first time.
AN UNANNOUNCED ADMISSION INTO HER ROOM REVEALED THAT SHE WAS OCCUPIED WITH RUSTLING UP MASKS OF DIFFERENT COLOURS