Death and Grandmothers - II

In May 2004, I was at home, back from boarding school. In the mid-nineties, my parents had built a home in the sleepy town of Purnea in North-East Bihar, a few years before I was sent away for schooling to Patna, and then Delhi. Consequently, I did not spend any extended period of my childhood there. The house also changed almost every year, to cater to different needs. The room that my sister and I shared for those 2-3 years has changed many times over. Whenever Dadi, my paternal grandmother, visited, it was in this room that she stayed, and in the late nineties, when she moved in with my parents, it turned into her room and became the centre of the household. It was also in this room that I found myself having my last conversation with Dadi. 

My parents had celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary only days back. My siblings were away in college, but my maternal uncles and Nani, my maternal grandmother came down for it. It was to be the last time both my grandmothers were together. I left for Delhi the next day for a short stay. I came back to a house in crisis with Dadi’s health in a poor state. Her heart, which had been weak for years, was threatening to give way. She had been sick several times in the past, but there was an eerie sense of unease in the usually comforting hustle of that house. There was a look on my father’s face that I had seen once or twice before when she had been sick. It was a look of barely hidden foreboding. 

I remember sitting with her in her bed in the same room surrounded by compounders and nursing staff, and her physician making regular visits all day. The distress on my face must have been palpable. During the few moments that she was feeling a bit better, she smiled at me and said reassuringly in Hindi, “Don’t look so worried. I will get better soon.” I nodded, holding her hand, wishing desperately that she would make good on her words. These were the last lucid words she spoke to me, as her health turned for the worse the next morning, and she died a few hours later. Her final words to me captured her personality accurately. To me, Dadi had been a constant source of comforting reassurance all my life until then. 

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My memories of Dadi are largely built around two rooms—the one in Purnea that I just described, and her room in Sinha-Sadan in Patna. It was in these two rooms that I shared with her that I got to observe, admire and cherish her. 

In the first decade of my life, we would always go to Patna during summer vacations, spending most of that visit at Sinha Sadan. It was an old house my grandparents had bought when they moved to the city, as much for the education of their children and grandchildren as any other reason. It was located strategically close to Patna University, a distributed, pre-independence campus on the banks of the Ganges. If you have read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, the fictional Brahmpur University is based on it. My father, my grandparents’ youngest child, went to medical school in Patna while living in this house, and it served as a base for almost twenty people in my generation, including me and my siblings, as we went to school or college in Patna. 

From the 1970s when my grandparents moved to Patna, till 1999, when Dadi moved to Purnea, Dadi exercised a keen oversight over the Sinha Sadan household. She had many rules, which everyone living there was expected to follow. I had written that what fascinated me about Nani, my other grandmother, was her speed and tempo. With Dadi, it was her stillness. She would sit on her bed which offered a strategic vantage point to the living room, the dining room and the staircase, allowing her a view of the goings and comings of the house. 

Dadi’s personality was an interesting blend, in equal measures, of affection and severity. She was, in all possible ways, a formidable woman - logical, authoritative and with a biting and rustic wit.  I was always taken by her language— full of colour and imagery and replete with metaphors. She enjoyed a good joke, and when she discovered one, like many older people, was given to milking it fully, by repeating it to every person. She was fiercely protective of her children and grandchildren, and unsurprisingly, very big on family unity. She placed a high premium on education and designed her life around giving her children, and later grandchildren, the best shot at higher education. In many ways, she was, what we would call a tiger-mom/grandma. 

Growing up, she was the first older person that I was close to. I would look forward to the summer vacations with bated breath when we would visit her or vice-versa. I was an aloof kid, content to be left to my own devices, spinning tales in my head. Consequently, I was amusing to those who paid attention to me, offering the full range of entertainment that an imaginative child can. During those visits, I could regurgitate the tales I had built in my head to her. She was able to afford me, the youngest child or her youngest child, the luxury of patience which the other elders were unable to. She could be mean when she wanted to be, with piercing words and a non-caloric smile, but she also had the most affectionate eyes, holding as much love as any human eyes could.

As I grew older and less precocious, I remained close to her. She could be strict, particularly when it came to schoolwork and her own set of peculiar biases. One of the things she hated was the game of chess, she felt that it led to families breaking up. It was a strange prejudice, one that intrigued them and intrigues me now, whenever I think of it. In her final years, she was extremely suspicious of computers, deeming anyone who worked with them untrustworthy. She hated that I spent so much of my time alone outdoors, under the mango trees in Purnea, or on the terrace in Patna, afraid that some evil spirit of the tree would take hold of me, or that I would fall off the roof. These were very particular fears, which both amused and annoyed me in equal measure, and I loved kidding with her about how I would ward off the evil spirit with my handy and loyal cricket bat. 

Growing up, my belief system saw the world in black and white split between two kinds of people. The first kind were people who were practical, hardened, strict and strong-willed, the second kind were dreamers, flighty, less jaded but overall also, less impressive. I saw myself as someone belonging to the second group but constantly striving to be more like those in the first group. It has been many years since I saw the world as such and my worldview had undergone many changes, but in my early and mid-teens, this was how I made quick judgement calls about character. Dadi was undoubtedly someone who belonged in the first kind. So, while growing as I got exposed to her strict side, I only grew to like her more. I liked her decisiveness and strong likes and dislikes, even when I disagreed with them. To my impressionable mind, this was the mark of strong character. 

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Dadi had been a product of her times. Daughters-in-law in the family had to practise ‘ghoonghat’, Hinduism’s very own purdah system, in front of older males in the family even up to the 1990s.  It is the job of every generation to push the boundaries of tradition, to make the world a kinder place for their children. It was perhaps the failure of my father’s generation that they conformed too strongly. It may be that Dadi was too formidable, too much a force of nature who demanded complete obedience, or maybe my father and his siblings were too compliant. An old story that Dadi told when I was about ten has stayed with me. In it, Dadi needed some help from her father regarding the education of her eldest son, but her husband would not seek help from her in-laws. Dadi was able to expertly out-manoeuvre the situation that help was never actively sought but still provided so that the education of her child would not suffer. It was the tale of a resourceful woman navigating ethos and traditions, not to mention the egos of men, which threatened to come in the way of her primary concern. But, Dadi had a perfect grasp over ‘vyavahar’, that strange, intricate and hypocritical system of traditional illogics that continues to plague South Asian society. When traditional ethos came in the way of her nobler ends, Dadi was perfectly capable of managing them to ensure that her goals were met. It was the mark of a woman, who presided over tradition but saw it only as a tool to meet her ends, not the ends in itself.  She needed agency and control. When her second eldest son went abroad to study and practice medicine, she wrote to him every day to come back, cajoling and threatening him to come back. I wonder sometimes, whether this had anything to do with tradition, or simply a feeling of helplessness about someone so far away. 

She had exerted such strong control over the family, that when she died, it was a rent in the fabric, never to be mended. With her gone, the keen practical sense that she tempered tradition with went missing. The familial system devolved into hubris, a system so out of touch with its times, and so full of its deluded sense of virtue that it collapsed, at least in the ways that mattered. 

Joint family systems are supposed to provide strong support systems to Indian families, allowing for an extra cushion. However, they are, by their very nature, feudal, with centralised power and the expectation that dictats will be followed. In the garb of tradition, these systems forget that the more decentralised decision-making is, the more fulfilling it is for everyone. I sometimes try to imagine Dadi as timeless, frozen in the version of her that I most remember from the mid-90s, and how she would react to big life decisions that I took. She died when I was on the cusp of adulthood, about to finish high school. Over the next decade, I was to chart a path for myself which went wholly against the grain of the familial system that she had so carefully constructed. Would that have put distance between us? I do not know but I would like to think that both her practical disposition and her love for me would have led her to make peace with it.  

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The day she died, I changed into my pyjamas late at night and climbed into bed. It has been a long and painful day, with the cremation being the hardest part. But sleep doesn’t come. I wrapped the dohar around myself more tightly, even though it was the peak of East Indian summer. I was wearing a T-shirt, and pyjama but I felt cold. I wonder if I might really be coming down with something. I feel ill – not in my stomach or my throat or my head; it’s more of a full-body ache, an overwhelming heaviness that pins me to the bed, rendering me unable to lift so much as a finger. The walls in the house feel thinner than I’d realised. As I lay in bed, I hear the familiar domestic noises with startling clarity. For days afterwards, I felt sick. In the ensuing weeks, I woke from dreams of running through an unending labyrinth of hospital halls, strange because my grandmother had been cared for in her final years exclusively at home, barely seeing the inside of a hospital. 

I hated the process of mourning around me, the exaggerated crying. In the past, it had intrigued me how distant relatives would swoop in after the death of a person to perform the undignified act of loud and public crying, making an emotional capital out of a socially sanctioned spectacle, perhaps finding an opportunity to give vent to their own untold sufferings. Then I had looked at this display of grief with curiosity. Now, for the first time deeply mourning a loved one, it made me sick. I did not know who this was meant to comfort, the whole spectacle felt vulgar and gratuitous to me, especially to mourn a woman so practical. 

When Dadi died, I felt like I lost the only person in front of whom I was completely comfortable being a child. When we are young, we want desperately to grow up, but even while we are growing up, it is nice to feel like a child sometimes, to feel protected. That afternoon the day before she died, when Dadi promised me that she would get better soon, was the last time I felt like one.