Grandmother and Granddaughter
Anna Archer
It has not sunk in
yet.
Just that, there is a
silence
Where there was once
a voice.
An absence in a room
Still messy with her
odd things.
And all those
memories.
They are hung
suspended
Like photographs
dangling in a dark room.
Dim. But full of stories.
Let me pick one at a
time.
And go over each one
As slowly as I can.
v
In the very first photograph of my childhood album, she is
seated near my cradle. Both she and the cradle are bathed in a blue tint. And
out in the balcony to the right of the frame, there is a burst of warm sunlight.
Her watchful eye is resting on me. A half empty cup of tea lies at the foot of
her chair. There is a sense of a pleasant breeze circulating through the
blanket I am tucked under. And if you look closely, she has half a smile still
lingering on her face.
v
I am huddled under the transparent glass top of the dining
table. From above it a wrinkled but soft hand reaches out with a morsel of
food. As I try to dodge it, she too changes her strategy. She takes off into
one of my favorite stories. It was one of those million little tales from the
corpus that was the Ramayana. It was the tale of Hanuman and the demoness
Sursa.
As Hanuman flew to the
gates of Lanka for his divine mission, he confronted the large and terrifying
demoness Sursa. Sursa was guarding the doors to the city and anybody who wished
to enter it, had to pass through her mouth. Of course, Sursa was a sly one, and
she would hardly let Hanuman get off so easily. She thought instead, that she
would swallow him whole, and that would be the end of trouble in Lanka. But
Hanuman was not to be fooled. He accepted mighty Sursa’s request, but asked her
to accept him in his complete dimensions. And on will, he inflated himself,
into a bigger and bigger size. And correspondingly, Sursa too, had to keep
widening her mouth to be able to gulp him down.
And as she toke on the role of Hanuman, puffing her mouth
and stretching her arms wide, I could not help but carry on the play. I became
the mighty Sursa, tempted with hunger for this messenger of God. And my mouth
too opened up nice and wide. And just then, with a swift movement of the hand, the
clever Hanuman, slipped in the morsel into my mouth. I proudly gobbled what I
imagined was the great Hanuman captured in my mouth. Yet it was she who always
won the game.
v
She has inscribed in me a whole set of beliefs that won’t go
away even if I try. Well now, I hardly want them to go. I carry them within me
always. One of them slipped out of me into the open as I sat with a friend in a
café. For some demented reason, we were making twisted faces at each other. And
suddenly I gasped in horror. “No. No. Don’t do that. It’s breezy today. If your
twisted face catches the breeze, it would remain like that forever. Seriously.”
v
Pomegranates. She fed me those very often. As a child, it is
a tough fruit to eat on your own. The intricate peeling. The million tiny gems
that either scatter into a frenzy, or get stuck to the hard skin, and refuse to
come apart. Thus she did it for me. Squeezing each juicy globule into my mouth
and flinging the seed in her own.
v
We fought a lot. Usually, over the television remote. She
lay on the cane sofa, and I dumped myself over her legs. She needed a human
press for her aching legs, and I got a soft, undulating, bean bag like throne. And
in this strangely choreographed co-existence in our drawing room, we switched
between our preferred shows.
v
One of her most precious possessions was her sewing machine.
It roared and rattled through the day. It often woke me up from my afternoon
naps. It bred a bed full of cut and uncut cloth, a paraphernalia of scissors,
buttons, needles and threads. But it also patched up each tear we endured. And
gifted us tenderly crafted new clothes once in a while.
v
I miss her. Her glares. Her rhymes. That sharp smell of
mustard oil in her room. The holy ash she smeared on my forehead as a blessing
at the start of each important day of my life. The laughs she shared with me.
The tears she let me see. The crazy love that we shared. From the beginning of
time.
