My mother's prayers

My mother’s prayer habits were very simple. In the morning she would clean the small area specially designed in the corner of the dinning room, where we had the Kovil azhwar and some God pictures. She would remove previous day’s flowers, wipe off the Kolam, do fresh kolam, clean the wick of the oil lamp, add oil and light it and adjust the wick so that the flame would be just perfect.

When the milk is boiled, she would take a tumbler full of the freshly boiled milk, add sugar, mix it pouring it from the tumbler to another a few times to cool it enough before she would place it in front of the Gods.

At that time she would also say a few prayers aloud. They were a mixture of various slokas. I haven’t paid enough attention to it or asked her about what they meant. Recently going through some list of slokas I recognised some of the ones amma used to recite.

Amma knew so many tamil prayers of various azhwars, all the Andal thirupavai, and understood the meanings fully. Though it is in Tamil, being the old Tamil some words are not so easily recognizable. She didn’t find them difficult at all. Out of all those the one she used to recite in the morning so appropriately is the 29th poem -

'Chittram chirukaale vandhunnai seviththu' (சிற்றம் சிறுகாலே வந்துன்னை சேவித்து)
This has become my favourite now.

Another one was on Lakshmi Narasimhar -
यस्या भवत भक्त जनार्दी हन्तु
पितृत्व मन्येशु विचार्य तूर्णम
स्तम्भेवतारः तम अनन्य लभ्यम
लक्ष्मी न्र्सिम्हम शरणम प्रपद्ये

I don’t know how she learnt it. Reading it now I realize how well she used to pronounce it.

The third was on Thirupathi Venkataramana -

श्रीमान वेंकट नाधार्य कवितार्किक केसरी
वेदांता चार्य वर्योमे सननिधत्तां सदा हृदि l

Undoubtedly, she knew the meanings of these too. She recited these as if talking directly to her Gods.