Great grandmother in her younger days was a beautiful lady.
Many were the students who would stand by the corridors of Indraprastha to wish her ‘Good morning Madam’ in the misty Delhi mornings nearly a hundred and fifty years before.
Great Grandmother taught Shakespeare, her favourite was ‘The Tempest’, an Avon edition in silky white pulp with a bright balding Shakespeare looking strangely handsome, that she read every night like the Gita or the Bible and kept under her pillow.
By then, great grand mother was already a widow.
In her late twenties as she waited at the village railway station, what greeted her out of the sleeper coach of the late-night train, was the railway coffin with her husband in it. He had died on the way.
Great grandmother then went back to do her post-graduation. Back to Shakespeare. Marry again? Never. He was my life, she would say. ‘The few moments with him are my eternity’.
It was a great code to us that put her on purity’s pedestal. She became our fairy tale of chastity.
Grandmother rose to become The Head of the Department of English.
She lived all her life in a girl’s hostel, helping students to write British English and poetry.
When grandmother retired, she came back to Kerala.
All her relations welcomed her,
wishing, that all her life wealth would be theirs. They gave her all she wanted, plantains dipped in honey, but grandmother
would have none of that.
Nothing of her wealth. Even the fruit of her mango trees became bank FDs.
One day while climbing the wooden stairs of her ancestral home, great grandmother slipped and fell. She broke her spine.
The doctors said she would never rise again.
I remembered then, great grandmother, standing before my old Click 3 camera by the hanging blossoms of the Chinese lanterns.
She was still beautiful at 78. A kind of Portia. That was when she fell.
Independent soul,
great grandmother she said she would lie in an ashram, to die. She would not burden any relative. To the ashram she would give all her wealth.
You come alone, she mumbled, You go all alone.
Soon, all her relations, they said, stingy, dirty, old selfish woman, no wonder her husband died young. No wonder she broke her spine. God did right. We’ll have nothing , to do with her anymore.
Time lays big eggs in the desert and life scoops them down in the dust.
Thirty years later I visited my great grandmother at the ashram. She’d been lying in bed for thirty years now, bed sores sun flowering all about her spine, that the ashram mates washed at guest-time.
She lay, her open eyes rolling up the old teak ceiling,
completely blind.
She was told by the holy sister of the benevolent ashram, Akka, your favourite grandnephew has come.
In a room that smelt of sudden Dettol and tulsi trying to outsmart all pus, great grandmother held me tenderly by my hand,
(The same hand that gave me such a beating l’ll not forget the night
I tried to dislodge ‘The Tempest’ from beneath her pillow)
And she kept mumbling to me, you have come , you have at last come, I waited for you so long I knew you would come I knew you would find me. Now I can die, I can die in peace God will not put me to test any longer. My time has come, My time has now come God will not let me suffer any longer.
Her cataract eyes flitted like silver butterflies. That afternoon as I drove
among the paddy fields diamonding rain amongst their tiny flowers, the rain wipers momentarily clearing glass,
I dreamt my dream.
It was all, about God, all about the earth’s seasons, all about you and me, why the seas churn the sands
choking our lives immersing us in tidal grandeur, why, all this benevolence of fire blossoming us
in its burns.