Death and Grandmothers - I

“Nani is no more. She left us around 9 pm today. Tried to contact you but no response.”

I saw the text from my mother only as I was about to go to bed. Sometime in the last two hours, with work, cooking and eating, I had not glanced at my phone. I spent the next couple of hours on the phone, booking tickets and packing for an early morning flight. It was well past 2 am as I went to bed, for a few short hours. I lay in bed awake for most of the night, tossing and turning, waiting for it to sink in. Nani, my maternal grandmother had been 96, the last of my grandparents. I had last spoken to her the day after her birthday, about four months back. She had sounded well and cheerful, her feeble, thin voice stronger than usual, and as always, her primary question was when I would visit her. I knew that with eleven alive children, one alive sibling, several grandchildren, beloved nephews and nieces, and a fair few great-grandchildren, I must lie low in the pecking order of loved ones whose visits she must long for. Yet, I had not visited her in some years, and my abiding feeling that night and over many nights since was one of regret.

****

I have been fortunate to know three grandmothers who have loved me, and whom I have loved—two who have been related by blood and one by marriage. In a life which has been largely bereft of grandfathers, the roles these three women occupied have been all the more notable. It is perhaps a testament to our egocentrism that when someone dies, we inevitably think of their influence on us as if their lives’ primary function was to support our individual stories, rather than be their own whole stories which we had the fortune of intersecting with. I will beg for your forgiveness as I engage in this selfish exercise reflecting on them.

****

I have often tried to recall what my earliest memory of Nani might have been. Much like your parents, your grandparents are just there. They are a reassuring constant of affection, a distant constant if you live far away, but a constant nevertheless. In the television series, This is Us, the character of William Hill sums up the feelings of a grandparent better than I, as a childless person, ever could. “What an unusual thing, to love someone so unconditionally when you know time probably won't allow you to be such a big part of their story.” Nani had the good fortune to have been a significant part of many a grandchild’s story including mine.

While growing up, our time at Nani’s house was special. They were marked by late nights spent in my favourite uncle’s room listening to stories which often stretched into the wee hours of morning. The thing that struck me the most about Nani as a child was her speed and alacrity. In the late 1990s and early 2000s when I spent the most time in her Patna house, Nani was in her early to mid seventies. She was always a frail woman, slight and stooping. She would wake up at the ungodly hour of 3:30 am to attend to her gods. Between my uncle’s late night (non)-schedule and Nani’s early morning schedule, I always marvelled that my Nani’s was a house that never sleeps. 

From 3:30 in the morning, she would oscillate between her bedroom and the bathroom and the pooja room at a velocity that I was simply not used to seeing in an elderly person. This would go on for a couple of hours before she settled down in front of her deities for a good few hours. As a ten-year-old, this briskness and tempo that marked her bearing is how I came to view her entire personality. There was a slightly hurried quality in everything that Nani did, whether eating, gently tossing morsels of food in her mouth without letting her lips touch her fingers, or thrusting a fistful of dry fruits in my hand as I left for school early in the morning. I have often found myself wondering whether she was an impatient woman but do not have evidence in my memories to indicate so. It is far more likely that she just liked doing things fast and making the most of her long days.

Nani might have been the most devoutly religious person I have known. Her devotion to her gods was paramount, and to her, it was only natural that all other considerations and relationships were superseded by it. There was to be no cooking of onions and garlic in the household, let alone the consumption of meat. I remember standing with my cousins in the driveway and eating tandoori chicken and mutton liver cooked in the kitchens of family friends. Years later, she was to relax this rule for her favourite granddaughter and her husband. When they visited from the US the year she passed, Nani did not like that they had to go out for a meal whenever they wanted to eat meat. A separate kitchen and dining table were set up for the consumption of meat. 

Given her obvious devout nature, it is ironic that it was in her house that I took my first steps towards agnosticism. It was in stories told by my uncle, or as a witness to civil (and sometimes not so civil) disagreements about serious matters that I began to develop an appreciation for rationality. As a ten-year-old, my time in that house presented me with the workings of what would become my worldview, with reason as a guide to life rather than tradition, and a spirit of argumentation and scrutiny rather than obedience as the tool for navigating it.

Over the last two decades, through my teens, early adulthood, and now approaching middle age, I became more and more, every year, what can be best described as a practising atheist. My lack of belief in god went beyond mere indifference. I saw religion and the particular social mores that well-to-do, high-caste South Asian families like mine practised as regressive and unjust, and to me, discomforting and upsetting. In my personal and social life, every decision that I took, every choice I made, in some way or other reflected my disapproval of the kind of life that must have been envisaged for me. This put some distance between me and large parts of my family, most of whom remain conventionally religious. It is strange then, that it left how I viewed Nani, the most religious of them all, bereft of impact.

At times, I have wondered how she might have viewed some of my choices, such as the refusal to have a religious wedding. I knew that it had caused some pain to my mother, who had inherited religious ardour from her mother. I spent some time with her at the wedding party and visited her in Bombay soon after with my partner. If my choices bothered her in any way, she had ample opportunity to voice them. I do not know if, at that age, she simply didn’t care about the matter, or chose to get over them. Either way, my partner and I were grateful to spend that time with her, without any acrimony clouding them.

I remember when we were leaving her home, she wanted to do a ‘teeka’ for me and my partner and give her some grains of rice, supposedly a ritual for newlyweds to bless them with a prosperous married life. It is worth mentioning that this visit was at the end of a few very long months of arduous negotiations with my parents about how we wanted to get married, and then the week of the wedding itself. By this time, my partner and I had an almost Pavlovian response of fight or flight to anything maritally religious. My uncle asked Nani to forgo the ritual. However, so disarmingly welcoming Nani had been to my partner that she volunteered to receive the grains of rice.

Nani had this effect on people. I was reminded of a story that my uncle had told me. Once while travelling by air, she had been stopped at security check with a bottle of gangajal. When the lady at the security tried to explain that she could not carry the bottle in hand baggage, my grandmother blessed her profusely and stunned her into looking the other way.

There was, however, a deeper reason at play. Through the process of getting married, my partner and I had felt judged, misunderstood and alienated. My partner and I were trying to get married in a way that reflected us and echoed the way we wanted to live our lives in partnership with each other. But, the complete lack of understanding and appreciation of what we were trying to do that we received from my family, left us feeling utterly unaccepted. Those few moments of welcoming acceptance we got from Nani meant a lot more to us than she must have realised.

I have wondered about this little exchange and the time we spent with Nani. What had made my partner and I, more accepting of her version of religious ritual, than say, that of large parts of my family? From what I knew, Nani had retreated into her religion after the untimely demise of her eldest child, who had tragically died in her youth. Her faith gave her refuge from what must have been a blow too hard to bear. She practised a version of religion, which despite the household rules it begat, felt deeply personal. In the many weeks spent in her Patna house, I barely recall having to participate in the everyday practice of religion. Unlike my paternal family, which practised a more social and performative version of religion, Nani was perhaps content with it being more personal, and consequently less imposing. It is not as if she did not have religious demands of her children and grandchildren, but they mostly related to her own religious needs rather than a directive on how they should practise it. 

She may have been deeply religious but possessed a surprising willingness to break with tradition. Nani survived her husband by over thirty years, and as a matriarch, presided over a household where many different philosophies co-existed. Her children had distinct personalities, each with their particular brand of stubbornness. In its own limited ways, it was a democratic household, with no hegemonic centre of power. Years ago, when her favourite granddaughter was navigating her way out of an abusive marriage, she received support from Nani. This, more than anything else, spoke about her priorities, where she valued the happiness of her loved ones over social mores. 

*****

As I look for inherited traits, there are two where I can draw a straight line from Nani to me. The first is her love for dressing up. Her daily makeup ritual is a much-storied part of family folklore. Her fashion sense was immaculate, and she loved getting ready, plaiting her hair into a bun, and using Pond’s vanishing cream and powder. When I was young, I thought it was very cool that Nani always wore sleeveless blouses, a rarity for a woman her age, particularly in Patna. It seemed an extension of the part of her personality where she liked things to be just so. This was a trait shared by many of her children including my mother, and now, also passed on to me. I also like the way I dress, to be a statement about who I am, just as much. And, with age, I have become more and more compulsive about how everything I own must be organised.

The other trait of her personality — her love of music, is passed on not just to me, but is in fact, a quality that defines the family’s culture. Nani was trained in classical music, and this translated into a lifetime of love for singing and playing the harmonium, later the synthesiser and the dholak. Nani’s dholak was a feature of many a Patna weddings in the 1990s. She was expected to arrive with it, and along with my aunts, lead the singing. To me, this form of sangeet baithak continues to signify what a tasteful wedding gathering ought to be like, where family and friends sit around singing folk and old Bollywood songs and playing music. All her children inherited a love for music, a talent for singing and a feel for musical instruments to varying degrees. This culture of singing lives on in the households of many of her children and grandchildren. 

****

I am blessed or cursed with a particularly morbid imagination. During Nani’s last years, every time I got a text or phone call from my mother or uncles, I feared the worst. She had made it through some very difficult illnesses and the dreaded pandemic. Through all the visits to the hospital, tubes and, poking and prodding, she continued to live a full life, one of good spirit and cheer. I was always struck by how many of my uncle’s friends and work colleagues knew of her and spoke of her in glowing terms. It was a testament to both my uncle’s devotion to her and her irrepressible spirit that amazed everyone who came in contact with her. Finally, like her husband three decades ago, she was to succumb to a horrible choking accident. She died in the arms of her most devoted son on the way to the hospital. Now she is gone, and I am, like my siblings and so many of my cousins, grandparent-less.