The scariest thing about
growing up is realising that your family are just normal human beings. They are
flawed. They seem more and more imperfect, the older you get. And yet they love
you unconditionally and in that moment you remember what family means.
My Dadima was a
storyteller. She wanted nothing more than an audience and I humoured her. I
suppose it’s true for many of the elderly but boy did she have stories. Of all
my four grandparents, she was the most talkative. She would spend all afternoon
reading her books and her newspaper and all evening explaining the ways of the
world to me. I lived with her for a few months when I first moved to Bombay in
2012. She was in fine form. The saddest thing about the cancer than eventually
took her way was that it silenced her. There are few tragedies more heart-breaking
than a storyteller silenced. She lost the ability to speak and my world lost a
familiar voice. Let us not deify her – I don’t think she would have wanted that.
She was not perfect. If I may be so bold, I want to tell a few stories of my
own.
She grew up in a
different time. She was 11 when India gained independence from the British
Empire. She really really didn’t like the British. She didn’t much care for
white people in general, from what I could gather – they were all out to get
her. She was a deeply proud Indian and I think she carried the pain of colonial
oppression with her. She was proud of being Indian. But she was prouder still
of her Hindu identity and I think that that identity freed her from the
tendrils of modern history. She could lose herself in the greatness of the
ancient scriptures, cosy in the knowledge that it pre-dated these blood-thirsty
Europeans by thousands of years. She danced between Hindu philosophy and myth
in a way that mesmerized us as children, laying on the sofa-bed in our Bandra
house and watching the purple night sky saunter heavily on outside. The night
sky from that Bandra house – her home for the better part of 50 years – was lit
so beautifully by our imaginations. It was a worthy canvas and I can’t begin to
say how thankful I am for that giant window in the living room that let the
night sky roll in every evening. She would never miss a chance to explain to us
how this God built this and that Goddess said that and every story would end
with some mere mortal understanding his inescapable finiteness and “falling at
the feet of Lord ______”. If the guy didn’t fall at the God’s feet, it wasn’t
the end of the story. I couldn’t separate the myth from the metaphor and I
dismissed them all as fairy tales. I’m not going to say I’ve had a change of
heart now. I’m simply saying that as a storyteller, she enchanted us with the
majesty of Indian mythology – as only a grandmother can. We didn’t ask questions
or fall asleep. We just gave her an audience.
Dadima always reminded us
spoilt, foreign-educated kids who we were and where we came from. She would
make it a point to sit us down and tell us about the village she came from and
how she raised my dad after moving to the city. She came from romantic poverty –
at least that’s how she made it seem. Life in the village was crossing rivers
to get to school and drying tamarind in the summer. The childhood she told me
about, was about seeking and striving for an education. She and her two
siblings would study by kerosene lantern. Listening to her talk about the value
of an education was more humbling than inspiring. To get out of the village,
you had to study and learn to read and write and learn to love languages and learn
to love learning. She told me how much she loved learning English (without
loving the English) and how empowered she felt with it by her side. She told me
how when she went for a job interview (at the bank where she would eventually
spend her career at in Mumba), she carried an Oscar Wilde book. She didn’t even
understand all of it, but the bank manager was impressed by her ambition. She
told me about the bank manager, a Parsi gentleman, who was an eminent womanizer
and whose charm crashed hopelessly against the folds of her sari. She would
remember these kinds of things. Who wouldn’t be impressed by a candidate
carrying an Oscar Wilde book to an interview, even today? Maybe some things
never change. She showed me what it is to love the English language. She showed
me its power and its beauty. She loved languages and spoke so many, so effortlessly.
It is one of my deepest insecurities that I cannot speak an Indian language
anywhere near as well as she spoke about 6 of them. “Once you learn one of the
four South-Indian languages, you can learn them all.” She found comfort in
Kannada poetry. She eulogized about a Kannada poet and teacher she had in high
school. She loved the nuns who taught at her convent school, despite being
Christians. She’d give out rationed bursts of begrudging love from time to
time.
She was clear about the
way things were and they were as she understood them. She would say things
like, “I was never beautiful, but I worked hard.” What a thing to say! I was
never beautiful? She was always apologising for herself like that. Here was a
mother who woke up at 5am to cook food for the family's breakfasts and lunches before
taking the train to work, working a full day, managing the children in the
evening and making dinner by the time my granddad got home. These days she
apologises for other things.
“Sorry, I didn’t make any
non-vegetarian food.”
At the cancer ward (after
her successful surgery) when she was weak and unable to move, she saw me
looking at her with sadness and said, “Sorry you have to see me like this.” She
found the time to apologise to bystanders for having cancer.
She loved singing and
music and chanting her bhajjans and putting coconut oil in our hair on Sunday
mornings. She would make us her trademark yellow dosas and chai using utensils
given to her as wedding presents 50 years ago. She was someone who didn’t throw
away the plastic cutlery that comes with home-delivered Chinese food. She would
wash and reuse them. “Why should we throw them? We can use them.” And they will
sit, unused, for another 50 years.
I’m glad she remained
sharp of mind until the end. When I was leaving Bombay in January, she asked me
to sit next to her on the bed and kissed me and said “I love you”. She would
sing to us in Konkani about love all through our childhoods but she had never
said those three words. I knew then that she was ready. She had checked out of
the hotel. When her voice began failing, maybe she thought her story was told. I
wish I had recorded her stories when she was alive. I told her to write them
down but I don’t think she told stories to document them. I think she told them
because she loved doing it. She loved holding an audience as I hope I’ve held
you. So here’s to her, the storyteller never silenced.
