A Grandmother Remembered
…or an ode to all women whose labor — physical and emotional — was dismissed as duty.
“Don’t come too close,” our normally affectionate grandmother would beseech us. (மேல படாதே, மேல படாதே was the refrain in Tamil.) Once she had showered, no one —not even a toddler– could touch her till she had finished her morning prayers. Unquestioningly, she followed these rules of ritual purity, which had been handed down to her as a teen bride — till disease robbed her of memories. When Patti died, earlier this year, at the age of 96, she had been suffering from dementia for nearly a decade. A kindly South Indian grandmother, she wore a pair of asymmetrical nose rings favored by women of her generation. Forget Kanchipuram silks, she looked elegant even in her everyday white-dotted sungudi saris: a standout and a stereotypical Patti at the same time.
All Pattis are good cooks, aren’t they? I loved her classic paal payasam and delicious instant mango pickles. When those 2-minute noodles first appeared on the market, she said, “Maggi is just plumper semiya,” and proceeded to make a slurpy upma of it. Puzzlingly, Patti made her own “tastemaker,” a signature blend of spice powders. We claimed her unused spice sachets for use in all manner of savory dishes. With cardamom and varying combinations of saffron, nutmeg, and tricky green camphor, she conjured up a variety of sweets for our birthdays.
Patti’s birthday, which fell on Children’s Day, was easy enough to remember, but we know precious little about her childhood. In 1942, when Singapore, a British bastion, fell to Japanese forces in World War II, Patti’s family in Nemmeli received visitors. It was her paternal aunt and her brood from Madras. An official order had encouraged residents of the city, who were not essential to its functioning, to leave immediately. Even the eldest of Patti’s visiting cousins, a 16-year-old, was about as non-essential as they come, and so they left for the countryside.
By the time the authorities declared Madras safe again, my grandmother was married to this teenager. In the city, her cousins went back to studying. The aunt-cum-mother-in-law trained Patti in the skills needed to run a household. In independent India, the family moved up in the world. Their good-sized home earned a reputation for hospitality. House guests staying there for varying lengths of time, including young women who enrolled in colleges, could always rely on Patti for hot meals and a kind word. Patti, with her pleasant smile, served daily visitors excellent coffee.
Good coffee, connoisseurs will tell you, begins with good quality milk. ‘The milkman comes with the cow at 4.30 in the morning. Someone must watch him otherwise he will add water,” says the elderly woman in R. K Narayan’s ‘The Painter of Signs.’ This aunt is now about to leave for Benares. The protagonist, the painter, realizes that if his milk and curd had been pure and creamy all along, it was thanks to the invisible labor of this elderly woman. She had stood watch beside the cow at dawn, watching the milk pail in dim light to make sure the milk remained undiluted. The jar of gingelly oil she has stocked now had to be aired once a week, and he has to ensure that insects don’t get into the jar when the lid is open. And oh, there was enough stock of dried vegetables for two years; the rice in the jute bag had been picked clean of chaff and stones. “Don’t waste any of it,” she tells him before embarking on her journey.
My industrious Patti thought similarly. Forget all their prayers, fasting, and other rituals, a zero-waste policy seems to have been the one true religion of women of that era. Housekeeping was serious business for people like Patti. The physical and emotional labor put in by the women in charge of feeding a multi-generation family in those days boggles the mind. And beyond the kitchen, they forged the family’s future—buying gold and nurturing social networks. In a crisis, they quietly did whatever was needed to prevent the household from descending into chaos.
Patti had very little leisure. In the little downtime she had, a younger Patti crocheted cute purses, drew floral-geometrical kolams or did delicate needlework. Middle-aged Patti would doze off in the middle of browsing through some Tamil weekly. Overall, she did not seem to have a lot of time and energy left for reading.
After Patti had passed on, the items she had collected over a lifetime were divided among appropriate relatives. On that occasion, they handed me a thin sheaf of articles I had written for The Hindu. I burst into tears. The fact that Patti had cared to save my writing over the years was, to me, the very best keepsake. Some memories came rushing back. I recalled that Patti, the mother of six, had learned the English alphabet through a Tamil-English correspondence course. When her children left home, she wrote to them in chatty Tamil, printing just the address in English, in her neat hand. How my mother looked forward to those thin blue inland letters, crammed with news about family!
At some point Patti seems to have gotten into the habit of organizing the letters she received, along with cherished photographs and newspaper clippings, into an archive of her own. A picture of my mother, her eldest, in her rented graduation robe. A full-page article about her youngest daughter’s boutique. An invite to a granddaughter’s Bharatnatyam debut. Letters from me, and my brother, as graduate students in the United States. My condolence letter when Patti’s nonagenarian mother had died in Nemmeli. (Clearly, longevity runs in the family.) And there was more. I am yet to find out what she saved of my aunt’s, a graduate of the College of Engineering, Guindy. Perhaps it will be a letter from my mother-in-law praising me when I was a new bride, the engineer jokes.
Even at first glance, Patti’s curation tells a story. Women of her generation had little opportunity to study or participate in life outside their homes. So, she was delighted that her daughters were educated, and happier when the world acknowledged their work. Clearly, she saw her ten grandchildren as individuals, though she treated each of us the same. If she had a favorite, we did not know it.
Patti’s best qualities – kindness and patience – we took for granted, and as for the smaller things about her, mostly, we never thought to ask. I am left with no idea of the times, the people, or the place that shaped Patti — a first-person account of that different way of life is now lost to me. She did not seem to question ritual, husband, or hierarchy. Seismic changes in women’s liberation have happened since, so there things I will never understand.
How did Patti see the changing world? What was Patti’s first phone conversation? When Patti briefly set up home with just her husband and children, what was it like to talk to her aunt-cum-mother-in-law through this instrument? What did they chatter about? One evening, in recent years, when I held up my phone for a selfie, and asked her to smile, she responded with, “Who smiles without any reason?” I found this funny and began to laugh. The laughter must have been infectious because Patti began to smile. Soon, we were like a pair of giggly American preteens inside a photobooth at the mall.
And I caught a fleeting glimpse of pre-dementia Patti.
In a Peanuts cartoon strip, the usually crabby character, Lucy, tells her class about her grandmother who used to work for the defense plant during World War II. When the men enlisted to fight, there were gaping holes in the industrial labor force, and women stepped in to fill the gap. The bandanna-clad fictitious character, Rosie the Riveter, became a powerful recruitment tool and an American cultural icon. These women recruits were expected to leave their jobs after the war ended. Those who stayed were paid less than their male peers, but men could no longer claim that women were unfit for jobs outside the home. The women had proved their worth. In the post-war era, more women entered the workforce. Rosie the Riveter, in effect, turned the tide for American women.
Talk to your grandmother, ask her questions, and “you’ll find out she knows more than peanut butter cookies,” says Lucy, who had just discovered that her grandmother was a wartime riveter and the employee of a telephone company after the war. “My grandmother helped to make this country great,” she declares, and demands applause from the class.
Perhaps some of our grandmothers too went to jail around the time of World War II, heeding Mahatma Gandhi’s call to women to participate in India’s freedom struggle. Managing everything at home, while the men participated in the freedom struggle was a no less valiant thing to do. We don’t know much about the personal histories of our grandmothers, and how they adapted to difficult situations.
So, how best can we remember our doting grandmothers? The cartoonist Charles Schulz was reminding all of us, self-absorbed grandchildren of the world to be more curious about older women in our lives. To acknowledge their contribution. If your Patti is still around, ask her questions. You will, no doubt, be surprised and delighted by what you learn about her. Best of all, you might even catch a fleeting glimpse of your Patti as a little girl.
**
Pattis come in pairs. If you read about this one, maybe you want to read the other as well.