How do we define someone’s life who has lived on this earth for nine decades, been through an unbelievable range of experiences, seen so much sorrow and joy, and leaves behind a legacy of a large family?
Today we’ve all been talking about my grandmother who passed away yesterday. She was 91, and leaves 7 children and 7 children-in-laws, 11 grandchildren, 10 grandchildren-in-laws, and 16 great grandchildren ranging between the age of 3 and 18. Her own brothers and sisters were a total of 11, of which two died very young, and 8 died later from causes as varied as swimming accidents and cancer. The numbers are unfathomable for us with small families today.
Paati was born in Madras in Thiruvallikeni at Gosha Hospital, and died at a hospital in T Nagar. But in between, she has lived in Hyderabad, Allahabad, Calcutta, Delhi, Nagpur and Bangalore. This is only what we pieced together – talking to her younger brother might throw up other places from her early childhood. She has visited and stayed for days or weeks with her children in Pondicherry, Lucknow, Vellore, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Goa, Nagpur, Delhi. She has never taken a vacation for fun except for a one night visit to a resort with my parents when she was past 80, but she has visited Kashi, Gaya, Rameshwaram and other pilgrim places.
It is difficult to talk about everything that defines her, there is that much. One is the wide span of places she managed to seamlessly adapt to; another is her financial planning abilities and sharp intelligence. We often talk that paati could have been in the CBI, she would know what’s going on which corner, who is lying, who is hiding something, who is trying to sneak in shopping into the house without showing it to her. Or she could have been an engineer or scientist if she’d had the opportunity. She knew how to fix a broken faucet, how to work a spanner, how to patch up a seeping floor with white cement. She was very good at maths, could read three languages – Tamil, English and Hindi. She even attempted learning a fourth, Kannada, using kids spelling books, when she was around 85. She religiously read the newspaper every morning, and would tell us about power cuts and water supply issues well in advance. She had fantastic memory power.
She knew to knit and embroider, mend and sew. She was extremely creative at repurposing and making DIY art. During the times when new year greeting cards were a thing, she would cut out the roses and lilies from the cards, and then paste them on empty covers to make gift envelopes. She would make pooja decorations like umbrellas for Ganesh Chathurthi using discarded odds and ends. She made dolls for my daughter using bits of wool, cloth, beads and strings. I owe my high needlework grades at school to passing off my knitting to paati after I got bored with it.
And of course there was the cooking. The daily grind of functional cooking would happen before we know it, with no fuss and no drama. Mostly the menu was a large vat of sambhar and a vegetable on the side. She just knew how to put food on the table, it was a given fact of life. But when it came to festivals and goodies, there she was a queen. She would dish out sweets and savouries - badusha, coconut barfi, gulab jamun, carrot halwa, kesari bath, ribbon pakoda, murukku, thenkuzhal, omapodi, bajjis and bondas in vast quantities. She would always make badusha for my birthday until the time she was able to cook. I remember one occasion where she bought a packet of macaroni when it was just coming to India and made it for me after school, upma style, and it was delicious. In her younger years, she did this under immense financial strain, strictly rationing how much sweet each of her children can get for Deepavali and planning accordingly. Once she could no longer could, her hands would always be busy preparing greens, peeling vegetables, shelling peas and groundnuts.
She brought up 7 children and supported many visiting nieces and siblings on a single income. Planned their weddings, saw them through the birth of their children, washed diapers and baby clothes, bathed and fed babies and mothers, cooked for guests. It was often a thankless job. We all remember it now, we don’t know how she really felt then. Maybe she didn’t think of it as a big deal. Maybe she struggled occasionally and didn’t express it. Expressing was not an option. She was tough as nails, she has no choice.
Which of these characteristics most defined her? It may vary for each of us associated with her, for me it was the intelligence and smartness. She would be sparing in her praise, she had high standards. She wasn’t one you could fool. Her brain was always working well, and she would solve puzzles, sudoku, jigsaws and dextrously play around with the Rubik’s cube till her last years. I always picked some brain games as gifts for her, and she always enjoyed them.
The sternness that she was forced to have with her children relaxed with her grandchildren, and even more with her great grandchildren. She knew to take a joke, but more often, she would pretend not to hear if the joke was against her. She was an expert at these little social coping mechanisms – pretending not to hear to be diplomatic, to avoid a difficult conversation. She would also not indulge gossip if others brought it to her, she would listen but never add to it or divulge anything about her own family.
Her last years – almost a decade – were difficult with frequent serious health issues, being in and out of hospital. She had multiple stays in the ICU, each of which felt like the final one. It was challenging for her, equally if not more challenging for her caregivers, both physically and mentally. She had a peaceful final day but a turbulent final decade.
On the days she was well, we mostly remember her sitting quietly in the balcony or near a window, in a small corner of her own, reading, meditating or lost in thoughts. She was also obsessed with giving money to visitors – from her stock of pension money from my grandfather’s job. She would sneak in treats that weren’t allowed for her health condition when nobody was around. Maybe these things gave her some fulfilment at a time when not much was in her control.
Towards her very end, she was just a skeleton of her old self, all traces of the strong personality wiped off. But on this day, we all remember all the other wonderful things that defined her long life.
