Bangles

She left behind the bare minimum, unsurprising to anyone who knew her. Gold jewellery, a symbol of prosperity and wealth in Indian society, was something she cared very little for. Amongst her sparse collection, we found six simple gold bangles. A worn-out, oxidized gold - not the shiny kind. Subtle and tasteful - not loud or attention-seeking. Dignified, just like her. 

If you look closely, they are slightly dented and bent, having survived the test of time. Crooked. Vankara -  the word she used to tease me and my curved and crooked posture as she smiled a wide smile showing her pearly white dentures. 

Fortunate as I am to be her granddaughter, two of these heirloom bangles ended up adorning my arms. I do not know where she got them from or when she got them. An addition to the long list of questions that I wish I had asked but never did. A laundry list of questions.

Laundry, that she folded dutifully to her very last day. Her wrinkled hands with the simple bangles gently brushing against Thatha’s stiff white cotton shirt and pancha. No one else was allowed to perform this sacred duty.

The same hands that made soft sweeping motions with the rice chata, manually separating black stones from white rice. Her skilful fingers would later mix an aromatic infusion of tamarind and spices with the now cleaned and cooked rice. I can still hear the soft clink of the bangles against the stainless steel vessel filled with pulihora.

A meal that she would eat with such satisfaction while situated comfortably on her favorite chair. The position I’ll most often remember her in - her bangled arms wrapped around her knee in a style of sitting that I have adopted. One leg folded flat on the chair, the other propped upright, knee underneath her chin. Unruly, I am called, when I sit that way. Though on her it was nothing but elegant.

I wear the same bangles but now the bangles have a different life. They clink against laptops and steering wheels and glasses of wine in a city 8000 miles from where they were made. By some miracle or not, they now see different sights and hear different words, sights and words that they had no way of encountering in their previous existence.

I cannot say if one life is better than the other. It is easy to think that the new life these two gold circles now experience is more liberating. After all, they spend far less time confined to conventional roles. They "broke free," a phrase so coveted and cherished by the modern Indian woman. But who is to say that their previous life was not just as fulfilling (or perhaps more)? For I don’t believe they will ever again see the vibrancy and hues and bittersweet troubles of their previous existence - complexities so beautiful and rich that people can only strive to experience them in their lifetimes. 

Ammamma

 “Ammamma,” the word that rolled off of six tongues myriad times over many years, with the paternal variation of it rolling off another two tongues. One word, literally translating to “mother's mother” - “Amma’s amma,” merged together in our native tongue of Telugu to represent three syllables that hold a treasure trove of memories and emotions for the eight now-adults. Grandma.

For me, it’s been thirty years of knowing her and seeing her at varying frequencies - from living with her in her own house, to living a few miles away from her and visiting her weekly, to eventually living far away from her, perhaps too far for comfort. My mind is etched with how she looked during each of these time periods. Her long dark hair was always tied in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, a hairstyle that lasted decades with the color slowly changing from natural black, to the jet black of Godrej black hair dye, to the red tinge of henna, to the grayish white of her final days. While wrinkles lined her face slowly over time, some things stayed the same, like the large red bindi on her forehead and her attire of simple silk-cotton saris with contrasting zari borders and matching blouses, tied around her tiny 5-foot tall frame. The body that went through five childbirths and one loss, stage five ovarian cancer, varying levels of blood sugar, and finally, a cardiac arrest at age eighty-three.

How little I seem to know about her childhood, self-absorbed as I was in my own silly battles with her. Or perhaps I was playing on the patriarchal strings of society and was convinced that the lives of my grandfathers were far more interesting than those of my grandmothers. While she herself did not know her exact birthday, I have very few details of her actual birth and her childhood years. She married my grandad at the age of sixteen in a traditional arranged marriage, and moved from a small village to the big city of Chennai. Her life seemed to have been overshadowed by her husband’s achievements, perhaps common for women of that generation in India. My grandad (Thatha) is intelligent, respected, powerful and self-made. College educated, as opposed to my grandma’s elementary-school non-English education. Physically too, he was a foot taller than her, dressed prim and proper in white,  bringing an air of command with him into any room he entered. All his grandchildren loved him, but also feared him and tip-toed around him while growing up.

But with Ammamma, the difference was stark. We’d casually put our feet up on the sofa and play whatever we wanted to on the television after a long day at school. We'd cry and throw tantrums in front of her. Beg her to take us shopping to buy the latest trend of bell-bottom jeans embroidered with pink flowers along the seams. Argue with her to let us wear those “fashionable” sleeveless tank tops, showing an extra four-inches of our lanky pre-teen arms, something that was close to unacceptable in her conservative eyes.  Bargain with her to give us eight finger-chips to accompany our lunch of steaming rice and rasam, instead of the seven that she carefully counted and placed on each of our plates. Convince her that we did in fact need that extra squeeze of tomato ketchup with our already saucy Maggi noodles.

Her relationship with her grandchildren was unique. It amazes me that she was able to touch each of her eight grandchildren’s lives with such intensity, despite the sixteen-year gap between the oldest and the youngest. My mom says that with her first grandchild, she learned how to love, how to care, maybe even how to be a mom, and her real experience at motherhood had started after her own children had grown up. So close was that bond that my oldest cousin ended up calling her “Amma,” viewing her as she would her own mother.

While all the grandchildren (and even some great-grandchildren) were blessed to experience remarkable moments of life with her and witness her positive and endearing side, full of care and the very definition of tough love, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that her relationship with her own children was complicated at best. Perhaps every family has its surmounting tensions, inexplicable losses and dark secrets looming over, but some of these took over her life and her relationships with her children and husband. While she had a wonderful, fulfilling life, I am also acutely aware that she perhaps had slightly more tumultuous experiences in her later years, with many incidents that were out of the ordinary. But she powered through and survived them all, resilient and brave as she was.

Her large house in Chennai is where everything begins and ends - we’ve all lived there at different times, spent sweltering summer vacations there, visited on random weekends, eaten delicious weeknight dinners on the all-too-familiar dining table, had unions, and so many reunions. Each of the five bedrooms, the open and breezy terrace, even the tiny musty-smelling storage room, are all full of cherished memories. The truth is all my fondest childhood moments completely center around Ammamma. The house where everything happened, 31 Hindi Prachara Sabha Street, will never be the same without her.