NEARLY a decade ago, my dear friend,
Father Lancy Pinto from St Xavier’s,
allowed me to interview his mother who was turning hundred, and today I thought it would be helpful to all of us, recalling the moments I spent with her: I remember the day when Lucy Pinto turned hundred. Not she to have stumbled and faltered, crept and crawled into her century. She scored, fearless and daring, gutsy and confident, each year, a gallant knock.
At her home in Bandra, five children gathered to quietly applaud her, her hard fought innings. I remember as they looked at a mother grown old, yet so beautiful, they saw true loveliness that stretched out from deep within. Inner beauty that defied the very wrinkles that proclaimed her age, character that stood erect in bowed, bent form.
Memories, beautiful ones and some not so beautiful brought tears to the eyes of her precious five; of a mother widowed young, struggling to keep her brood intact, ill equipped to fend for herself yet suddenly finding God given strength, and with such strength moulding them into men and women, their late father would have been proud off.
“She led the choir for evening mass,” her daughter Patsy informed me. I looked at her and imagined her voice rising in crescendo in the old chapel in Byculla where she sang. A song from the heart, powerful and vibrant, telling the world of a Master who stood by her through days when she needed Him by her side. “When I was twelve, I sang a solo in school,” said the proud centurion, her eyes glinting with a twinkle that must have lighted the hearts of her children as they strode, skipped, sauntered and also struggled the road of life with her.
“D’you remember how you heard the noise in the kitchen ma?” asked Daisy, “and with saucepan in hand you walked into dark room and shouted, “Even if its the devil, I challenge you to come out!” I laughed with the rest of them, as I realized it was a woman of courage, who had just hit hundred. “Or a few years ago, when she heard the building next door was haunted, she pooh poohed the idea and sat up all night outside to prove there was no ghost!” “Remember,” asked eldest Jessy, “How she walked into the houses of our neighbours, if a husband had beaten his wife and told the man to stop it?”
“It’s the three ‘F’s in her life that’s given her long life,” said her youngest son Vincy. “The three F’s?” I asked. “Faith, family and her fearlessness” he said. “She loved her family, her fearlessness was legendary and her faith in God, unshakeable!” Today, as you go through the journey of life, do remember the late centurion Lucy Pinto, and carry her three Fs with you, faith, family and fearlessness..!
