Wings of fire - Sir APJ ABDUL KALAM Wings of fire | Page 10

1
I
was born into a middle-class Tamil family in the island
town of Rameswaram in the erstwhile Madras state. My
father, Jainulabdeen, had neither much formal education
nor much wealth;
despite these disadvantages, he possessed great
innate wisdom and a true generosity of spirit. He had an
ideal helpmate in my mother, Ashiamma. I do not recall the
exact number of people she fed every day, but I am quite
certain that far more outsiders ate with us than all the
members of our own family put together.
My parents were widely regarded as an ideal couple.
My mother’s lineage was the more distinguished, one of
her forebears having been bestowed the title of ‘Bahadur’
by the British.
I was one of many children—a short boy with rather
undistinguished looks, born to tall and handsome parents.
We lived in our ancestral house, which was built in the
middle of the 19th century. It was a fairly large pucca house,
made of limestone and brick, on the Mosque Street in
Rameswaram. My austere father used to avoid all
inessential comforts and luxuries. However, all necessities
were provided for, in terms of food, medicine or clothes. In
fact, I would say mine was a very secure childhood, both
materially and emotionally.
I normally ate with my mother, sitting on the floor of the
kitchen. She would place a banana leaf before me, on
which she then ladled rice and aromatic sambhar, a variety
of sharp, home-made pickles and a dollop of fresh coconut
chutney.
The famous Shiva temple, which made Rameswaram
so sacred to pilgrims, was about a ten-minute walk from
our house. Our locality was predominantly Muslim, but there
were quite a few Hindu families too, living amicably with
their Muslim neighbours. There was a very old mosque in
our locality where my father would take me for evening
prayers. I had not the faintest idea of the meaning of the
Arabic prayers chanted, but I was totally convinced that they
reached God. When my father came out of the mosque
after the prayers, people of different religions would be
sitting outside, waiting for him. Many of them offered bowls
of water to my father who would dip his fingertips in them
and say a prayer. This water was then carried home for
invalids. I also remember people visiting our home to offer
thanks after being cured. My father always smiled and
asked them to thank Allah, the benevolent and merciful.
The high priest of Rameswaram temple, Pakshi
Lakshmana Sastry, was a very close friend of my father’s.
One of the most vivid memories of my early childhood is of
the two men, each in his traditional attire, discussing
spiritual matters. When I was old enough to ask questions, I
asked my father about the relevance of prayer. My father
told me there was nothing mysterious about prayer. Rather,
prayer made possible a communion of the spirit between
people. “When you pray,” he said, “you transcend your body
and become a part of the cosmos, which knows no division
of wealth, age, caste, or creed.”
My father could convey complex spiritual concepts in
very simple, downto-earth Tamil. He once told me, “In his
own time, in his own place, in what he really is, and in the
stage he has reached—good or bad—every human being
is a specific element within the whole of the manifest divine