Amma

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.