Elegance and Pam athai

My blog, as you know, is about more than fashion design. It's about designing life in its totality. Integral to a well-designed life are the people it includes - they are essential to providing balance, perspective, harmony, color - the elements of good design. My mother, whose life (and sarees!) inspires Jaya Designs, has a friendship that to me embodies one of the pillars of her own well-designed life. this is her close and warm relationship with my aunt, Pam ("Pam athai", in the Tamil reference to "aunty.")

There is not a time in my memory when my mother and Pam athai didn't sit together and even from afar, we could tell they were huddled in strategy to keep their children out of harm's way and on the (very) straight and narrow path. We could be visiting in our homes, in a crowded taxi in India or as tourists visiting Buckingham Palace... they would still be together - poised classically... sarees draped just so, stuffed handbags hoisted, one hand on furrowed forehead and another protectively guarding the precious handbag,sunglasses perched. Elegance and anxiety personified. Bosses, children, husbands, grandchildren, in-laws... no person in their realm escaped being the topic of their huddle. In their soft midst, troubles were willed away through sheer force of their belief and prayer.

My mother and Pam athai are my earliest influences of style, grace, willfulness, pure love... the truly feminine and the truly strong. Groomed, coifed, draped perfectly - they are still the ideal to which I aspire. We lost Pam athai last week to a very long struggle with leukemia, to which she not so much succumbed as surrendered to with faith. The shock of the loss of her physical presence has left us gasping for air, as if the earth has contracted and the oxygen has left it. We look up and see her through our ethereal visions of our Pam athai happy, whole and praying for us to be happy, impeccable, to live each moment with utter integrity and much more - to be all we can be and live the very best versions of ourselves according to not just our own power, but higher powers that are all around and of which she is now part. These are the images that will prevail. We hold onto that. Thank you, Pam athai.