June 6, 2018
Every year since 2018, June 6 marks the death anniversary of my grandmother. In 2017, around this time I had to cut short my visit to India and I never got to say goodbye to her. This, I suppose, is me processing that loss and making peace with it.
A few years before my grandmother’s death, in a rare moment of candidness, my father asked, “Jija, thane kai badalno veto aapne jeevan ro, toh kai badalti thu?”/(जीजा, थने कई बदलनो वेतो अIपने जीवन रो, तोह कई बदलती थू?) ~ “If you could have changed one thing about your life, what would it have been?” Without batting an eyelid, she replied “I wish I hadn’t been born a woman”.
One of the smartest women I have ever met, my grandmother was never able to get any sort of education because girls going to schools was simply not a thing back then. Nevertheless, she taught herself basic math. Many a times I had seen her with strings of rope with knots at regular intervals and I would wonder what it was until she explained that it was her way of keeping accounts. (I recently discovered a similar system, Quipu, the Incas used, showcased at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View).
In her early teens, she became an ad-hoc midwife and caretaker to her pregnant sister, conducting a complex child-birth at home. The word of her skill got around such that families would bring their young and old to her throughout her life, right to her very last days to fix nerve ailments of joints that doctors were too expensive for.
She worked like a horse, raising 6 children and starting up a textile business with my grandfather. They established distribution lines in the hinterlands of Rajasthan where no big FMCG would even bother to go. I realized the vastness of this network last year when we visited a small temple buried in the deep depths of the southern edge of the Thar desert. Every village that we stopped on the way recognized my father as, ‘Oh, you are the son of Bhanwarlal’. It also catapulted my grandfather’s reputation as one of the most trustworthy people in the region (he was trusted more than lawyers themselves) such that he would often settle financial disputes between families.
With my grandfather’s death, the proverbial baton skipped her because as far as they go, they simply don’t get passed on to wives, daughters or mothers.
Armed with a photographic memory, and even though she could not read, she remembered every hymn in every book of the temple. So much so that once she walked in to the temple, most people would not even bother opening the books and just follow along with her.
TV changed her life as she devoured hours and hours of it. I, like everyone else, thought it was just mindless watching. Until one day, when on telling her that I was visiting Malaysia, she said, “Kai vate kai beta, aapne cheen re neeche?”(Where dear, is it that country south of China?) Everyone in the room was stunned for a minute. This was someone who did not know how to read/write, had never held an atlas in her hand or sat in a classroom or stepped foot outside India.
Over the years, her strength, intelligence and habit of conviction earned her many……naysayers and of course she was never an easy woman to deal with. First in poverty, later in illness, she never lost her strength and dignity. With cataract and arthritis ridden joints she walked herself to the temple everyday through the battered lanes of Udaipur without fail and with little to no assistance. The word ‘complain’ and its synonyms did not exist in her dictionary.
Many people at the end of her life were at best confused and at worst repelled by her independence and ego. But sometimes I wonder, after a lifetime of overcoming adversity with sheer willpower, what are you really left with? A habit of self-assurance? I think so. She mostly could never extend to others the empathy that she had never received in life. This increasingly meant that her happiness came only from those from whom she actually expected nothing.
Thanks to my grandparents’, parents’ and my efforts, my world had changed drastically from hers. The gap was too much for either of us to process. In some ways I will always regret my inability to tell her that I did understand, that even though our worlds were “worlds apart”, yet from many perspectives it was much the same. That her struggle will always be an important part of my story too.
It pains my mind to think of how much human potential is snubbed away because of the skewed ‘cultural’ norms of our society. (*1)
My grandmother taught me, by example, that in any circumstance, whether external or even as internal as your own body, strength and dignity are a matter of choice. I did not always need a famous woman to inspire me because I always had and will have my grandmother. This was my grandmother’s legacy and I will always cherish her for it. (*2)
*1 – Today when people routinely insult female merit, talent or intelligence in their everyday lives, in ‘fun’/’friendly’ conversations, in Bollywood, and characterize all of that as ‘Oh, it’s just a joke’, unfortunately, I fail to see the humor.
*2 – by design and circumstance this will be the only legacy of hers I will receive, but I couldn’t have asked for better.
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