“Her family abandoned her in her ninth month of pregnancy. They left her at the side of a road to die. The stress induced labour pain. After delivery, when she looked around for something to cut the umbilical cord with, the only available tool was a sharp stone. She used it.”

It’s distressing for Mamata Sapakal to relive the gruesome conditions in which she was born. But she does it to underscore how her mother, Sindhutai Sapakal, went on to create a legacy of love despite the agony she was put through. Her lived reality did not make her cynical towards life; it softened her stance.

Hailed as the ‘mother of orphans’, Sindhutai was a human metaphor of love. While on paper, she was a mother to four children, in reality, her brood expanded to the thousands left at the doors of the sanstha (orphanage) that she’d been running in Pune since 1998. The space’s genius lay in the access that it granted to every child, irrespective of background, becoming a lifeline that cocooned them in a family-like love.

When Sindhutai passed away in 2022, her loss was mourned by the thousands who called her maai (mother).

Today, her legacy lives on in the work of her daughter, Mamata.

Left to die on a roadside

For most of her life, Mamata studied at a hostel. But fascination would colour her return trips home (Sindhutai and Mamata lived in the sanstha after being ostracised from the family), when she’d hear a hundred-odd children referring to her mother as ‘maai’. “I never questioned it; I just assumed the life script God had written meant she was to have this role,” Mamata reasons.

© The Better India