The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
How did—how does—Kareema Begum feel about her choices of over thirty years ago?
Looking back now, from where’s she at, it’s easy to think she feels proud and vindicated. After all, if she hadn’t made her son get down to work when he was a pre-teen, it is all too likely the world would never have had A.R. Rahman as it does now. Besides, there was also the question of staying alive. She did what had to be done when it had to be done. It is simple to say now that she did indeed make all the right choices all those years ago, given that we’ve seen the fairytale ending the story she set in motion has drawn to.
But it must have been difficult at the time, surely. No mother would want her son working day and night, unable to enjoy the things most other kids the same age would take for granted. It must have been heartbreaking for her to take some of the decisions she did for her boy, and she has said as much publicly.
‘She never let us see suffering though,’ says Raihanah. ‘All her struggles she kept to herself.’
Today Kareema Begum projects an impressive aura. She is physically unimposing—short, plump and round-faced with a wide, gentle smile that almost all her children have inherited. She dresses simply, but her bearing is coolly self-assured. And you know it’s not the sort of thing she’s picked up after she became known as the mother of one of India’s biggest stars, but rather something she’s always had.
If you visit her house and if she knows you, she will not let you go without feeding you—a pan-Indian affliction, but more so in her case. She is a fine cook now—and hers is supposedly the only food that Rahman ever craves.
‘Even if she’s cooked only a little and twenty people suddenly walk in, she’ll find a way to feed them all,’ laughs Fathima. ‘You might complain that you’re stuffed, but you’ll never leave her table saying you’re still hungry. She goes out of her way to help people too. We’ll sometimes ask her, “Why are you helping someone who isn’t even asking for it?” and she’ll just tell us to be quiet. She’s so generous and I think my brother gets it from her. People would even come by asking her to pray for them, at one point, if they were facing difficulties.’
‘We’re all close even now,’ says Fathima. ‘Even after getting married and having our own lives, we will still pull through for each other, no matter what. My brother, sisters and Amma come first for me. They’re my priority.’
AR, as the whole world knows, is his mother’s son through and through. She is at the centre of his existence and he describes her as not just a mother to him, but also a partner. There has been no event of significance in his life that she has not been a close part of. When he was a boy, it was she who decided he would work to support the family by becoming a full-time musician. But that was just the beginning. She would also go on to help him build his studio, pick his new name (the one a whole country would come to know and love) when he embraced Islam, choose the woman he would marry and remain deeply involved in all his business affairs.
AR describes his mother as this sort of formidable wall that keeps all negativity—people and energies alike—away from him.
‘She challenged and motivated him,’ says Rajiv Menon. ‘She can even tell him off in music, tell him that he hasn’t done a good job. She is his moral compass and his biggest influence.’
Rahman, of course, is a deeply grounded person. Very little unsettles him. He has seen enough ups and downs in life to understand everything is temporary, and he is also deeply spiritual. That’s a combination which allows for almost nothing to disturb or excite him. The one thing that can completely throw him off balance though is his mother’s being unhappy or unwell.
‘They were always very close,’ Fathima says. ‘If he’s in Chennai, he’ll make it a point to eat with Amma. Lunch or dinner. Usually dinner. That’s when I get to see him too. We see him at least once a day when he’s here. That’s when we get to talk.’
‘She is very possessive of him and he is utterly devoted to her,’ says Raihanah. ‘It’s difficult for someone who’s AR’s wife. They are the centre of our family. All the rest of us are really just side acts.’
Almost everything seems better in hindsight. When you look back on your salad days, after you’ve become wealthy and famous, the past doesn’t seem all that bad. So while Rahman does acknowledge he didn’t have it easy, he never complains that he had a terrible childhood. He sometimes makes a passing comment about how he lost out on a lot of things as a young boy, but he isn’t bitter about it, doesn’t linger on it. The same goes for his whole family. His sisters insist that while abundance was a bit of a distant dream, they never felt the strains of struggle—and all credit for that goes to their mother.
‘She did everything she could for all of us,’ Fathima says. ‘She did her best to give us whatever exposure she could, and she did a great job of it. We’re alive now because of her.’
AR himself probably summed it up best in his Oscar acceptance speech. Standing on that first stage of show business, grinning from ear to ear, he repeated those legendary words from a Hindi film: ‘Mere paas ma hai.’ Even if I have nothing, I have my mother. ‘And my mother is here.’
