Life Story of Vasantha Ramaswamy

Every morning at 5:45, before most of her South Bangalore apartment complex has stirred, Vasantha is awake. There is some exercise, ten minutes of meditation, and a walk beneath the early light. She plans her days with care and is never late. If she is expected at five, she will be there by 4:55. She traces the habit to her father, a self-confessed workaholic and stickler for time.

Vasantha was born in Kerala and raised in Kochi, where she studied through her postgraduation. After marriage, she and her husband moved to Kuwait, where they spent nearly three decades. She taught, first at an Indian school and later at Kuwait University, for one simple reason: she loves being with children. In 2014 she resigned, and the couple made a new home in Bangalore.

Then, in early 2018, came a diagnosis she never saw coming. Cancer. "Out of the blue," she says. Like most people handled news like that, she first met it with denial. Then came surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

Through 2018 and into 2019, she stopped wanting to be seen. She worried about what people would think of her without her hair, and about the questions they would ask. Her doctor urged her to sit in the sun each day. She would just sit in the balcony but did not muster the courage to face people.

The turning point came from within. She began to counsel herself, sometimes out loud, with a stern and loving pep talk. I am capable of much more. I will not waste my time. The day she finally walked down, she was certain everyone was staring. Nobody was. "It was just my own thoughts," she says, laughing at it now. She followed her doctor's protocol exactly and still does. Eight years on, she is in remission.

Today her life is full in the way she chooses. She crochets, which she calls a stress buster: "I forget the whole world." Every November she books a table at her complex's Rajyotsava festival and sells her work. Decades after she first learned the Veena, she has picked up its strings again, "literally and figuratively." She plays only for herself, and for the quiet satisfaction of knowing she still can. She has a passion for singing, be it Carnatic or Karaoke music.  She is a vegetarian who cooks three fresh meals a day and never tires of feeding guests. She has a natural flair to get along with everyone, from the tiny tots, to teens, to young adults to older ones. Her elder son lives in London and the younger in Bangalore, who has a three-year-old son, whom she adores. She and her husband travel whenever they can, across India and overseas.

Ask her about ageing and she is refreshingly plain. Aches will come, and some things will no longer be possible. But she sees no point in mourning the calendar. "Within your capacity," she says, "you can do everything under the sun." Growing older, in her view, is not something to feel sad about. It is something to accept gracefully, and then to get on with living.

Ask her about life itself and she pauses, because she has had her lows. There were times she asked why me? and even what is this life? But her answer is the one she earned the hard way. Life is beautiful, she says, and how it looks depends on where you stand. Gratitude helps. So does talking to herself. Her dictum in life is to find pleasures in simple things and celebrate life in little ways.