My Mother

Rukmini Venkatraman 
(13 December 1927-23 February 2020)

Rukmini Venkatraman, my mother who passed away on Sunday, 23 February, at the age of 92 at her daughter Dr Sarojini Parameswaran’s home in Kilpauk, was for a major part of her life a resident of the Alwarpet-Abhiramapuram quarter of the city. Born in a highly literate Tamil family in Kerala, she came to Chennai in 1945, when she married PN Venkatraman, a son of scholar V Narayanan MAML, and Sarada, daughter of Justice PR Sundara Iyer, one of the most distinguished of the legal luminaries of Mylapore.  

Tiny, soft-spoken Rukmini then came to live in Suprabha, a two-storeyed house on Murrays Gate Road, a house shared by her husband, a bank officer, and his elder brother PN Sundaresan, the cricket correspondent of The Hindu. She was a talented woman, trained in Carnatic music and blessed with a sweet voice, and academically brilliant—until the household responsibilities of a joint family that straddled Murrays Gate Road and Eldams Road meant she had to be content with completing Intermediate, the equivalent of today’s class XII. 

Amma, who had learnt to play the veena in her teen years, surprised all of us in her forties by acquiring some proficiency in the sitar. She also took Sanskrit lessons well into her seventies, passing a couple of exams in the language. My father passed away aged 73 in August 1992, and Amma then took over as our sole parent, shepherding her six children, their spouses, grandchildren and great grandchildren with love, generosity and total impartiality through good times and bad. She was the magnificent rock of support we all leaned on until her very end. She was one of the most popular members of the PR Sundara Iyer and R Sivaramakrishna Iyer families, two formidable clans that produced many an achiever in a wide range of fields.