Pushkala Hariharan

Pushkala was born as the eldest daughter to a lower-middle-class Tamil-speaking Brahmin couple, Hariharan and Gomathy.

Nagercoil, her birthplace, gets its name from its Tamil equivalent, which means the “temple of the Nagas or snakes.”

The Hariharans lived in an ancestral property bequeathed by Pushkala’s paternal grandfather Gopalakrishnan. Gopalakrishnan was a Mridangam artist, and his primary income was through plying his trade.

Hariharan worked as an accountant for a wholesale dealer, and his wife Gomathy was a homemaker. The family was getting along in the sea of life when a tsunami struck in the form of Gomathy being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Little did Pushkala know that this would be fatal. Hariharan’s brothers, sister, and neighbors supported the family by taking care of kids as well as attending to hospital needs during the six months of Gomathy’s hospitalization. “The untimely demise of my mother left us in total disarray. She had been our caretaker, homemaker, and nurturer.”

As Mermillod, the Swiss Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, said, A mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take.

Around the same time, she lost her paternal grandfather. In line with the signs of times, her grandma could not leave her home for a year. During this time, life was hell as Hariharan just could not cope with work and home.

A year later, his mother, that is Pushkala’s paternal grandma, seeing her son struggle to manage the family, came to take care of them. She helped out the Hariharans for eight long years, which became the most robust foundation for the subsequent successes in Pushkala’s life.

The one-year period with the father not knowing how to cook was the most testing time for the family. Maybe there is a lesson there for the menfolk. Perhaps they should learn how to cook. We think children raised by a single parent or grandparents are spoiled brats. Grandma was a modern-day feminist who believed that women must stand up on their own feet and be financially independent.

It is with this broadminded outlook that she raised Pushkala and Anu, Pushkala’s younger sister. Anu was three years younger, and both had a rigorous routine of rituals, domestic work, academics, and playtime. Grandma ensured there was a charter for everything! The day often ended with the disciplinarian granny turning into a doting grandma where she narrated bedtime stories of Ramayan and Mahabharat so that the kids stay firmly rooted in our culture.