“It was during my sixth grade when I met my husband Elumalai. I had no idea I would marry him at all, then. He was ten years elder to me then and sort of indirectly proposed to me. I was too young to understand what he said at all and completely ignored that proposal,” a blushing Suguna fondly remembers. From the seventh grade, she joined the girls’ blind school in Trichy and fell sick during her 10th public examination. She was bed-ridden but managed to attend the exams with the help of a teacher. After passing her 12th grade with flying colors, Suguna’s father decided to stop her education due to lack of money and instead decided to teach her what he was good at – weaving and embroidery. Suguna, with the skill of touch, learned that too and her father made sure she picked up everything he could ever teach her.
“When I was asked about my ambition, I would only reply “A teacher,” because every successful person needs a teacher to reach a peak in life and I believe nothing is greater than the job of teaching,” Suguna adds.
And so, at the age of 16, Suguna found herself restless sitting at home for a long time and decided to teach the seventh, eighth and the ninth grade children their school syllabus. In the year 2004, Elumalai found his love after many years and married her. “She is an absolutely ambitious woman. I told her I would support her and remain beside her in whatever she chooses to do. I knew she was intelligent because, at just 10 years of age, she would hit me and teach me my subjects,” he recollects laughing.
After her wedding in 2004, Suguna came up against a huge struggle. The visually impaired Elumalai would sell candies at the Tambaram railway station, Chennai, as that was his job. While Suguna was nine months pregnant, her husband suffered a fall in the middle of the road due to a seizure and that was when she realized that he had hidden that health issue about him. We ask her how it felt to learn something as severe as that, to which she reasons, “He was insecure and afraid to lose me and decided to hide it. When my father asked about this, I asked him to consider what would I have done, had the roles been reversed. That’s exactly why I never considered it a big deal.”
Fearing that it could snowball into a case with the police, none of the Autorickshaws bothered to stop and help the then-pregnant Suguna and her husband. After a while, one of them finally helped her admit him to a private hospital. Exactly a day after her husband was discharged, Suguna gave birth to her baby boy in 2005 who is now in the seventh grade and aspires to become a district collector. Suguna looks back on how without anyone’s help, she would give her infants a bath, which even normal mothers would fear doing.
