Ernest Hemingway’s famous phrase ‘grace under pressure’ conjures up visions of war-scarred heroes, doughty bullfighters, lonely fishermen battling with the elements out in the deep sea. Vimla Pande, or Maami, as she was fondly called, was none of these. Yet, for all those who knew her, Maami was an embodiment of grace without measure.

Maami passed away quietly, without fuss, in her Almora home last week. Her death went unnoticed, for she was no public figure in the usual sense of the term. She was much more than that — the still, calm centre that sustained and nourished, soothed and nurtured not just her family but anyone who came in touch with her.

Her ICS husband B.D. Pande rose to become the country’s seniormost civil servant and served as governor of West Bengal and then Punjab. Her brother, Vinod Pande, too served as cabinet secretary and then governor. Her elder daughter-in-law, Mrinal Pande, is a well-known writer and editor, while her younger son, Lalit Pande, runs one of the finest NGOs in all of Uttaranchal.

Yet Maami never basked in the reflected glory of those around her. She had an incandescent glow of her own that drew even chance acquaintances into her nurturing embrace. She had none of the egotism or pushiness that surrounds people who belong to India’s power elite. Unlike most senior civil servants who cannot live outside the peripheries of Delhi’s power circuit even after retirement, B.D. Pande chose to return to his ancestral house in Almora — that most unpretentious of hill towns which has never bothered to dress itself up for the outsider’s gaze or the tourist’s praise.

And for those of us who walked down the 130-odd steps from the crowded Mall Road to the Pande home, Maami would always be there with her gentle smile and simple warmth, and wondrous afternoons would be spent in conversations that meandered from the humdrum to the profound.

Fiery feminists may scoff at women who devote their lives to being “just a housewife and mother” but women like Maami — effortlessly entwining tradition with an ageless modernity — have sustained entire families, cultures and civilisations in this country. Her death has deepened the silence of the hills, made the winds in the pine forests of Kumaon just a little colder for all of us who knew and loved her.