My Grandmother

What can one say about Ba, except that she was the epitome of the universal concept of a grandmother?

Her physique - soft and plump; her demeanor - sweet and gentle; both concealing a core of steel and an indomitability that belied the temperate exterior. Raised in the small town of Sarsa in Gujarat, she was married off in her early teens, as was the custom, to the son of a farmer, also a Patel. And as was the custom, my grandfather, Dada, changed her name and Rupa became Suraj – from ‘beautiful’ to the ‘sun’ – radiant in any name and form.

It was wonderful to sit on her bed as a child and listen to her stories; her rudraksha mala moving constantly, failing to skip a single bead. I rarely heard her describe her life in the village as being hard. There were no regrets, no complaints. It was true the wells of Ode were deep, and it chafed her hands raw as she pulled water, and that was that. She knew all the ways to eke out a living Dada’s meager schoolmaster paycheck. To save a matchstick, she would walk to the neighbor’s hut with a piece of scrap paper to get a light for her chulo.

Ba would regale us with the adventures, in the true sense, of life in the village. She once heard screams emanating from the outhouse. Choosing a broken-off branch as a form of self-defense, she rushed out of the hut. Dada stood cowering in a corner, pointing to the snake wending his way towards his bare feet. Calmly bringing the stick down on the snake with resounding force, she then carried it out and went back to the hut to continue rolling out the rotlis for dinner.

When my father contracted small pox, she carried him in her arms, some distance away, to the temple of Shitala Devi, the Goddess of Small Pox. She paid no heed to the naysayers about the chances of curing her son of the deadly and infectious disease. Whether it was her faith in the Devi, or her steely determination that her son would not and could not die, my father carried little else from the infection, but a few pock-marked scars on his face.

We heard about the pilgrimages she took, to faraway holy places. Pilgrimages that took weeks and months, in bullock carts, with real danger imposed on the travelers in the form of dacoits and wild animals. Whether these stories were apocryphal, just to keep our attention and give us that gentle frisson of fear, or whether they were actual accounts, one can only conjecture. I for one would prefer to believe the latter.

We had no cuddly toys to cling to in bed, no warm, fuzzy blankets. Ba was our security blanket. There were times when, even if fabricated, I would cry out, Ba! Sapnu ave che! using a nightmare as an excuse to crawl into her bed and snuggle up against her soft, talcum-smelling warmth. I would find the pallu of her sari and pull it over my head, rendering me invisible to the monsters, which would then hopefully pass over me in search of other six-year olds with no Ba for protection. We would repeat her nightmare-dispelling invocation together…Rajrasik, damyantinasevak, ratuparan, karkotak naag, korumtam, kari nastam! To say the names of the divinities out loud in rapid succession was to dispel the incubus and invite a deep and blissfully divine slumber. Most of the times, I would fall asleep out of the sheer boredom from the monotonous chanting, that had neither meaning, nor as a clear picture as with the proverbial fence-jumping sheep.

She was the rock we clung to, a pillar of moral rectitude. 'You see a pencil on the floor at school, do not touch it! You pick it up, and with it you pick up a piece of desire to keep something that does not belong to you!' Gentle admonitions on concepts of honesty, integrity and courage from someone who had never attended school, leave alone held a book in her hand and based purely on her own experience and the teachings of her elders, passed down through the ages.

Ba never grudged being brought from the village, where she could have lived out her remaining years in the peace and solitude of rural life. Instead, here she was, in a big city, in an apartment, looking after three, young motherless girls - ages 2, 4 and 6; girls, who fought in English, a language totally alien to her. She found it futile to intervene or admonish, not knowing what they were fighting about.

Aliyo! Jhampo ne! English ma su karva jhagdo cho! she would cry out, her open palm repeatedly smacking her forehead. Soon her patience would start running out, and she would fall back on invoking a few gods for the strength to deal with us. Seeing her distress, the fighting would stop and we would run to hug her, burrow ourselves in the folds of her blue sari and beg forgiveness.

With every death in the family, the color of her sari would change. As with the norm, I guess she must have started off with the traditional white for mourning, which changed to a maroon with my mother’s death, then to light blue with Dada’s, and finally in 1961 to black, with the death of her oldest son.

I was sixteen when Ba died. One minute she was asking for more sugar in her lemonade, the next she was gone, the nitroglycerin tablet still in her hand.

“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”

Leonardo da Vinci.