We used to meet Shaila and Seshagiri to recollect our good old memories.  Shaila had very good memory till the end.  They were complementary couple.  
We offer our heartfelt sympathies to their two sons and all their family members

I met Shaila tai at a friends home in the late 70’s. She struck me as such a kind and caring person. Over the years we met here and there and each meeting was so joyful. Shaila tai you have a special place in my heart and I will remember you always with love

Anand 

Our heartfelt condolences to you and your family.
We have so many precious memories of your mom and she will be truly missed.
Jeyashree and Venkatraj Bhat

We used to meet Shaila and Giri on Sankranti day  every year and exchanged greetings and snacks. Giri and Shaila were an ideal couple, always welcoming and pleasant to be with. After Shaila and Giri moved out of their house, we could not meet them. 
We offer our heartfelt sympathies to their two sons and all their family members.
Usha & Raja

Our heartfelt condolences!
We are very sorry for the loss of your loving mother so shortly after the departure of your father.
I got to know Shaila through her close friend Jaya Bercovitch who in turn was my close friend and neighbour. 
Shaila had an unassuming, kind and loving personality.  When Jaya used to spend winters in India,  she only trusted Shaila to take care of her finances. I was in charge of checking the functioning of the furnace in Jaya’s house, and I would call Shaila whenever there were bills she needed to take care of.  Shaila would then drive into the city to Jaya’s house and take care of what needed to be done, no matter whether there was a snow storm or not. Later on, Jaya and I would occasionally visit Shaila and Giri for lunch in their home, and in spite of Shaila’s back problems, she would prepare a feast for kings! She was an honest, reliable and loving friend, a truly great person with a heart of gold.  I will remember her very fondly!


She was always so thoughtful and never forgot to call me on my birthday.  This was the first year I did not hear from her.   I will miss a good friend and our community will miss one of their smartest people.

Mom and Dad were married in 1960, and were married for 60 years. They were a very complementary couple sharing different strengths and had a very strong bond.

One astonishing thing about my mother was her skin, if you could have bottled that elastic quality of her epidermis and sold it you would have made a fortune. Doctors would routinely look at her file when she was in her 80s and do a double take. Here she is 88, and my cousin Shaila and her son have come to visit from Scotland. 

I remember Mom showing me pictures of Indian girls perhaps whose parents were looking for an arranged marriage. “What do you think of this girl?” she would say. I always had a nasty comment that would earn me a slap on the back of the head. In the end, when I brought home Monika it was pretty hard for her to push any sort of arrangement, given the way her and Dad met. The wedding was held in the backyard of Auntie Jeya and performed by a Unitarian minister but Mom and Auntie had already conspired to do the coconut puja ceremony a few hours before. It was a belt and suspenders wedding day.

Our parents bought a place in London, near the Sudbury Hill tube station after the girls at work convinced her that paying rent was like throwing money away. The house cost £5,000 which was a lot of money in the 60s and I remember we had a coal fireplace to heat the entire place. I think it took a lot of courage for them to buy property, later in life my Dad used to lament on how much that London house would be worth today and my mother would reassure him that they had made the right choice, moving to Canada.

This Mom after we moved to the United States: Bedford, Michigan right across from Toledo OH. Before we made the trip, we lived in a crummy basement apartment for a month and before we got our new house, we lived in a crummy  motel for a month, which really put a strain on everyone, but Mom held us together. We drove down in two cars, my parents in one car and my brother and me in a second car with 2 cats, a litter box and hamster that only had one testicle (Smedley). That really raised some eyebrows at the US border.The hamster survived the trip and lived a long life, my brother claims it was the lack of testosterone that prolonged his life.

Mom and Kathleen formed a friendship of more than 60 years, after meeting on an economics course in Manchester. I spoke with her this week, she took many of the photos that are seen on this group page. She and Mom would go to Wimpy's (of Popeye fame) when hamburgers were just becoming a thing in the UK, where the fish & chip franchises were probably the strongest. It was Kathleen who told me about my father, emerging from the shadows after their economics course. Kathleen and her son David, visited Canada many times over the years and they kept in touch, writing and by phone.

Mom was the soul of discretion, as many knew, even if you told her the most intimate details they would never leave her lips, you knew you'd never hear your laundry aired on the evening Hindu news. She was also quite the diplomat. In her finest moment when asked by friends about Monika and me living together she said "The situation is unclear from my vantage, he may be living with her, she may be living with him, or perhaps both of them are shacked up with the cat." That's United Nations level diplomacy.

If it wasn't clear by now, Mom was always in our corner through good and bad. She was a nurturer, comforter and our greatest fan. On occasion, if you really made Mom mad, you would get the silent treatment which was worse than being yelled at or thrashed. In those desperate moments she you would do anything to win back her favour: step off a cliff or agree to an arranged marriage.

I'd forgotten that Mom and Dad were relatively young when our kids were born, they happily would make the commute from Montreal to Cambridge and we would do the same. My daughter reminds me that my Mom would babysit them on the weekends and take on the metro to the zoo at Angrignon park, a great adventure, I had forgotten how active they were, given that the last few years of been much tougher. It's easy to lose sight of of the life that was when our parents pass.

This photo was taken in 1976, our parents moved into their first house in Canada, about 5 years after immigrating. Mum loved this house in Preville (Saint Lambert), she could decorate how she wanted and best of all she finally had garden where she could grow flowers and vegetables. Preville turned out to be a very nice place to grow up, lots of kids on the street and good neighbours. When we moved back from the states Mom really wanted to move back to Saint Lambert but it was not to be. Lots of fond memories of this place.

When my brother announced he was getting married in 2005, Mom almost fell off her chair with happiness, she had long given up praying for him to meet the right girl. Amazingly, Brenda originally hailed from Cambridge, Ontario where we lived for 6 years. It was the Euro-Canadian wedding with a ceremony in Paris, Ontario and the lunch in London, Ontario. Second picture shows Mom applying the marriage bindi (dot) and Anne, Brenda's Mom, watching closely to make sure there is no Hindu conversion happening.

This is 2011 when we had a surprise brunch/roast for our parents' 50th anniversary. As part the Hindu wedding ceremony your receive a coconut which symbolizes selflessness. For a joke we spray painted a coconut with gold paint and presented it to my parents, representing the golden wedding coconut, they didn't find it as funny as I thought they would. By this time, Mom, with her entourage was really starting to look quite the matriarch.


Mom worked in Manchester for company and as always, made friends very easily. Here you see her with girls from the office that obviously were curious about what it was like to wear a sari. It must have been quite a job swaddling all these gals into their blouses and wraps and even more fun the first time one of them wanted to use the bathroom.

Mom and Dad always used to entertain, the parties at the house were lively and there was always an amazing spread of food. Mom's basic tenet was to count the number of people coming and make double/triple the amount of food, for God forbid you should ever run out. The women always took the opportunity to dress up and I remember Monika going to the Sari shop to pick up a salwar kameez. The Sari shop was run my a guy who looked like the Indian Christopher Walken, and one time when something Monika bought fell apart, she told Mom that she had to return it. "He tried to avoid me so I chased him into the backroom and told him how shoddy his good were" she told my parents. They both looked horrified (they knew Monika was quite capable of doing this) and were very relieved when we told them it was a joke and they could show their faces in Montreal without fear.

One of the more nerve racking moments in my life is when I brought Monika home to meet my Mom. Mom looked her up and down and said, "Do you like Indian food?" Monika replied yes. "Do you like mangoes?" Monika replied yes again. Afterwards I said, "I didn't know you ate Indian food or mangoes". Monika said "I don't, but it seemed the correct answer for your mother under the circumstances". Happily she turned out to be a fan of both.

Unlike my father, who called us both sonny, my mother who was doing 10 things at once would do this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious thing with all of our fulll names at once SitaramSeshgiriHemantTiggerPenny until she hit the right one. The last two names on that list were cats. And she would do it really fast like an auctioneer. I'm pretty sure this is a universal Mom trait.

Circa 1970, Taj Mahal, talk about casting pearls before swines, Mom's attempts to teach us about Indian culture typically led to frustration on her part. "If the king was locked up in a tower, why didn't he grow his hair and throw it down like Repunzel to a prince?" One of the thousand of facepalms that Mom had to live through with us.This very well could be the Princess Diana bench, but I think Mom pulls it off well.

It was the 60s and Mom adored The Beatles, I remember her singing those early songs long after we moved to Canada, they were memory evoking of her life in the UK. In contrast, she could not stand The Rolling Stones and especially Mick Jagger, she used to do this imitation that was quite convincing complete with vacuum cleaner face and Jagger moves. The Beatles were nice boys, the Stones were thugs. Whenever I needed some serious cheering up, I would demand the Jagger imitation.

I'm hearing stories about both my parents that are new to me. Mom was very close to her four nieces who all traveled to live in England while my Uncle was posted. The youngest one shown in the first photo told me that once she was with Mom in our house while everyone was out at a funeral. She asked Jayashree what she would do if she ever saw a dead body.. and then lay on the floor and was absolutely still. My cousin panicked of course - this story surprised me, I guess there was a time when Mom was a bit of a practical joker. The same little girl visited us many times, probably reliving the terror of that joke.

How my mother met my father: my mother worked for an export/import company as a clerk and my Dad trained as an engineer after his physics degree. One of my mom's friends recalls him appearing "out of the shadows and possibly wearing a bowler" after a night class she was attending. The two of them would probably never had wed in India, but they met abroad and built a life together. The bowler may be an embellishment, I have yet to see any photos that prove this is the truth.

When my parents left the UK, people said to them "Canada is place of snow and infernal coldness, are you mad?" To their credit they were right, but Mom and Dad adapted. Here you see us on the top of Mount Royal, three generations of a nomadic family, looking for our reindeer herd.I think Dad my be holding a wineskin of some sort of fortification.


For the record, my Mum disliked camping, every tiny bit of it. Once when we were camping in PEI she got seriously ill on lobster and threw up in the tent. This why we now have the "never buy seafood out of the back of station wagon" rule that has been passed down generation to generation. She was a good sport most of the time but I think camping made her want to push my father into a chemical toilet.


So yes, that is Ravi Shankar and his tabla player with Mom and her friends. He was in Montreal to do a show and somebody knew him so he was invited over for dinner (no Indian man ever refuses free food). I had absolutely no clue what was going on, he was just another crazy sitar playing "Uncle" as far as I was concerned.

This is our wedding day, the day when Mom and Auntie Jeya "wrapped" Monika into a sari. Many years later when we attended the wedding of my cousin, they had professional dressers to "wrap" the women who didn't know how to wear a sari (it's 6 ft of material). After the ceremony Monika was in the bathroom when she realized they had pinned the sari to her underwear and had to call out to Mom stall to stall. It was at a golf club, and once the situation had been resolved another woman who was in the bathroom asked Mom if she was Sri Lankan. Monika said "I never thought I would see your mother wanting to punch someone but that was the time".

In 1957, my Uncle Vishnu, who was the head of the family after our Grandfather died got posted by the Indian government in England. He wanted my Mum to stay in India because he was convinced she would never get a husband in London. Mum stubbornly insisted on coming to England, and proved him wrong, avoiding the whole arranged marriage tradition. Both my parents chose the path less trodden, they later moved the Canada, which people in the UK thought was crazy.


Mum (far right) was the youngest of 3 sisters and 3 brothers, born in the Northern village of Sawantwadi. Her father was an officer in the Indian Cavalry and unfortunately both her parents died when she was very young.When her father retired from the military, he bought a farm. Mum ended up studying at Willson College which is on Marine Drive in Mumbai, she earned a BA in economics and statistics. Somehow my grandfather's horsemanship did not get passed to us.. all of us are scared to death of horses and large farm animals.

OBITUARIO

Shaila Rao (Nee Mangala Rangnekar)

6 mayo, 1930 – 29 junio, 2020

Collins Clarke MacGillivray White Funeral Homes

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