Ammai

 You would think that the heart would grow accustomed to these blows, year after year, one beloved grandparent after another. It was my last grandparent, my mother's mother, who died today. Her own last years have known one loss after another, my grandfather, her sister; the slow deterioration of her body, the aches and pains, the hear, the lungs slowly failing. I hope it came as a mercy to her, her mind was sharp to the end, I hope she did not know too much pain. She is gone, I do not weep for her, only for myself, that I will never see her again. 

Above all thing I regret my hesitance, the what-if's, the maybe's, the distance, the time, the coronavirus, the visa, that kept me from going there, and now its too late.

What are my first memories? She was in the kitchen in the house in Kamaraj ave, boiling milk maybe. Yelling at the cat - Polipolo when it knocked the milk over. She was hiding behind the mango tree at school, because I would not be left alone there. Walking me to Paatu Maami's house to learn music, Padmini Maami's house, Dhananjayan, to Raman sir's house, where she would sit and wait through every lesson. "Half-asleep, you with your eyes closed, and he also with his eyes closed." she would scold after class. 

I would go with her to Kutcheri's at Padmanabhaswamy temple and Music Academy and Narada Gana Sabha - as long as her legs allowed. A few weeks ago, I sent some TM Krishna lectures to her, and she enjoyed them and reminded me to keep singing. "Paada paada raagam, mooda mooda rogam". 

For me she is bound with all the years I spend at school. Coming home from school, walking from Sishya, or by rickshaw or van or by bus from Vidya Mandir and PS, shutting myself up in that small bedroom, she would make me paal-chai, flavored with tulsi leaves plucked from her plant. 

Ammai's love language was food, and her cooking was legendary. Alu parathas for school for me every day. Paata and Mummy already picking pieces off it even before she had packed it for the night. Then my friends at school would have their go at it. Parathas, Molakapodi, and as she grew too old and too frail to cook, she would buy me a packet of muthusaram from Grand Sweets every year.

And the snacks for every festival - appam and cheedai and pakodam, and the best Gulab Jamuns, which she was making even two years ago, even though she was getting frailer by the day. 

And she made dosai even for Nuggy! He was not allowed inside the house, so he would be tied up in the little place for dishwashing, and Ammai would make a dosai especially for him and he would gobble it up, the fatty!

Ammai married young - to me it seems ridiculously young, in that age, she was perhaps even old. She would talk about tutoring Paata for his exams, though she was ten years younger. They made quite a couple - Ammai barely at 5 feet, Paata seemed to tower over her, but her personality was more than a match for his height. 

To me she taught Sanskrit, my 3rd language for 2 years and 2nd language for 3. "Paropakaram idam shareeram". She lived in the service of her family. 

She was the ultimate martyr - not only would she push herself constantly to cook and feed and call people home, but she would always refuse the things that she enjoyed. But it was hilarious! We would take over chaat or a bottle of Sprite, and refusing all the while until finally, she would enjoy a sip or a bite. And I remember when Shrija and I got some ice cream for the family in Pennsylvania, and took them for lunch, we didn't offer it to her, because we didn't think she would eat it, but she wanted it, and enjoyed it! Ammai really did have a sweet tooth and our family's love for junk food we have inherited from her.

Ammai's house was where we all gathered in the evening. At least for an hour, even on weekends, in the days when she and Paata would go for the Bhagavad Geeta classes. To me it seems like such a short time ago, when they would walk all the way to Vidya Mandir, or Mummy would take them by car, when they were both there, and well enough to go.

She had so many stories - when I was young it was the stories of Dhruva and Prahalada, then stories of her family, how her mother came from Burma by boat with Ambujam Chitti, and Rashamani Maama and her, and lost her gold on the way, how her father walked through the forests full of leaches. All her stories were fascinating.

For someone who was born so many years ago, she was able to navigate the modern world so well. She adapted to WhatsApp and FaceTime. She had flown multiple times, all by herself from India to the US and back. I see people of a much younger generation struggle so much, and she was so impressive, that she never let the change of the modern world overwhelm her. 

It's so strange to think of the house in Gandhi Nagar without her. She was such a fixture in Chennai, it makes my heart drop a little, every time that I think that she will no longer be there when I go. It comes in sudden moments, "Oh, she's no longer there," an idea I'm still not used to. 

Even last year, when I saw her at the wedding, she seemed fine - vertigo she said, but it seemed like such a small problem, her mind was as clear as it ever was, if she was a little weak physically, well, that was only age. But maybe it was more than that and we never knew. 

I'll miss her terribly. I tried to call her every week this year. I remember her telling me to sing, I told her about the food that I'd cooked, I prayed that the pandemic would leave her unscathed. But she died anyway, even though it wasn't COVID. But Covid made everything so much harder - the fear of infection every time she went to the hospital, the fear of catching Covid while traveling, the quarantine period... there were few people at her rites than at my grandfather's because of it - probably for the best, but not what she deserved. 

I have been lucky to have her all these years, lucky that she was there at my wedding, that I was able to visit her at least once a year, and have her and Paata stay with me once; even 30 years ago it would have been difficult to see her so frequently, to talk to her so easily over the phone. But I will still miss her, Chennai seems a little emptier without her.

A month and a half into the lockdown

Did I say I was going to write everyday? Every week? Once a month I guess is better than what I've been doing for the last several years...

So you thought you were going to have a ton of time sitting at home during the lockdown. Work would slow down... how could there even be work? With the retail stores closed... Oh boy were you wrong. It doesn't matter whether stores are open or closed. Work goes on. With everyone working from home, the already blurry borders between work and life are gone. "Flexible" work arrangements simply means that you're on all the time... with email, text and phone that's all too easy.

So it was nice to take a day off on Friday. A half day volunteering at Martha's kitchen in San Jose was a nice change from sitting at home all day. There's only so much baking you can do. And now the oven needs a self clean cycle.

The worst thing about staying at home is how many more chores you have... cooking every day, means cleaning every day. Washing dishes, wiping down the kitchen. I miss my commute. 2 hrs a day just to be annoyed at traffic. What a luxury.

I have been doing a Couch to 5K. Thankfully parks here are still open. And the local lake is about 5K around. So getting fatter but fitter.

I'm going to emerge from this an expert on crappy tv series and shows. Yesterday was "The Report". The thing about making compromises to watch with someone else, is that ultimately you end up picking something that no one wants to watch. On the bright side, It's It ice cream is still great.

I finished watching "The Untamed"! Too cute for words, but if you ask me... read the summary, watch the first 3 episodes and then the last 15. Skip the flashback. 

Coronavirus diaries- Part I

It's been a long time since I've written, but living through what may well be the defining months of our time, I wanted to add my experiences and thoughts to the millions that are being expressed on multiple platforms.
In late January, when the first coronavirus news came out, and then in early February, going into Chinese New Year, no one thought it would come to this. There may be some small disruptions, but nothing that would stop the spinning of the world.
And then China put everyone in Hubei in lockdown; then everyone else across China, the first cases outside of China started to crop up, and I remarked that it would probably get worse before it got better, but even then, I did not guess how bad it would become.
My remark came from the supply chain impacts we were seeing - and then it was mostly supply side, with factories unable to come back after CNY. I didn't imagine a demand side disruption of this magnitude.
My Chinese colleagues were trying to ship masks to China, and they were getting held by customs.
I worried about my parents - traveling from India to UAE - travel spread accounted for most of the spread across other parts of the world at that time. I worried about my sister, traveling back to India from the UAE - she would go to visit my grandmother, and even that looked risky. But we were also looking at cheap flights to Asia, and wow! Bangkok looks so cheap!
Events moved fast. First the lockdown in Italy - Milan, the Italian tourists in Agra... it was strange, unbelievable that Italy, then France, Spain, Germany, should all be going into lockdown, and the US was not affected.
Only a few cases here, and of course, the ship parked off the coast of California, waiting to be allowed into port, only Trump didn't want the number of cases to increase (!)
And the cases did seem low - given the amount of travel from just the Bay Area to China and Europe, nothing to say of everywhere else. The numbers had to be artificially low - due to limited testing - everyone knew that. A couple of cases in Seattle, in Los Angeles... no epidemic yet. Markets were still high.
And then the crash as the sudden realization sprung everywhere all at once that this was not going away - there was a rate cut, which seemed to briefly make things better, before turning entirely ineffectual, and then days and days of red bleeding all over the market. Seems like a good time to buy. Except two things - 1) Just when I place a limit order, the markets jump back up 2) I place an order and it goes through, and then the market sinks again.
Things started shutting down everywhere. Microsoft was one of the first companies to recommend working from home. Bay Area companies were slower to respond. Apple was one of the last. Taking it one week at a time, and then they realized that this wasn't going away soon, and extended it to Apr 7th. Will it end by Apr 7th? No one knows. It seems like we may be in this for the long haul.

Saying goodbye to my grandfather.

This has not been a happy New Year. It started with my grandfather’s death on the 3^rd, a poor omen to begin the year. As I grow older (and I don’t think I’m all that old), the tragedies seem to pile up on me.

But my grandfather was old when he passed. He had been sick, neither his mind, nor his body were what they were. He may well be in a better place. It is those of us who are left behind who are bereft.

I remember him declaiming Shakespeare when I was 6 or 7…

“Let me have men about me that are fat.

Sleek headed men such as sleep of nights

Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look

Such men are dangerous.”

His massive “Complete Works of Shakespeare” was a book like a rock. Covered in brown paper, and printed in tiny characters that would ruin your eyes. I used to pour over it in the small bedroom in my grandparents’ house, when I was supposed to be “studying”.

There was one year that my grandmother had gone to visit my aunt in the US. My grandfather was left to fend for himself. I had always imagined him as an old-fashioned man, one who had never entered the kitchen, but there he was, making arachu vitta payasam – an enormous amount of work and other, complicated dishes! My grandmother complains that he got more credit for his occasional cooking than she did for years of excellent dishes.

We travelled to Payalur with Paata. While he was able, every year, he would attend the festival at the temple there. I remember the kolam, the walk to the hills, the narrow street with old fashioned houses, the thinnai, the dark rooms upstairs filled with strange treasures like strings or thermacol balls

I remember also, being older, and him taking my mother and I to visit his sister Chaalam atthai. It was a little cottage, that seemed to be set in the woods. An old kitchen, no mixie, my grandfather ground the coconut with a stone, by hand, to make an excellent payasam.

I remember that he loved mangoes, he would buy enormous numbers at the market during mango season, cut them, eat them and pronounce his verdict. We would all fight over the andi – the seed of the mango, to which the best part of the pulp was stuck, and which was the messiest to eat.

He was a religious man- on Tuesdays he would not speak until noon, save to do his prayers and not eat salt all day. Sometimes he would desparately want to say something, and he would have to make himself understood with gestures and “Mmm…mmm’s” and finally resort to writing. He believed in Hanuman. When I was in Cambodia last year, I was so excited to see so many Hanuman murals and statues, I brought a t-shirt home for him. I didn’t know he would never even be able to wear it.

I’ve met his friends, those he knew from childhood to old age, Kunjalam maama with the dogs, who lived just a few streets away, Appai maama… most of them are gone now.

The loss of memory, of knowing who he was, who we were, seemed to creep up on him slowly, each time I saw him, a little more lost, of mind and body.

A few years ago he would walk out into the hall, listen interestedly to all the news, and demand an extra cup of tea to drink with us (though Ammai had already given him one earlier); a year and a half ago he would sit up in bed, and while he often mistook one person for another, he was still very much there.

I saw him only a month ago. I’m glad I went. He was frail. He gave me a hug, and though I’m not sure he knew who I was, I’m glad to have had those last moments with him. 

The Reamker- Different perspectives of a familiar story

Thailand and Cambodia, in every temple – even the Buddhist ones, you’ll see pictures of the Reamker (Ramakien in Thai) – the South- East Asian version of the Ramayana. In Cambodian, and Thai classical dance (khon), puppet shows, paintings, in ruined cities and in gold leaf covered temples, there are references to the story. It is in fact, the national epic of Thailand.

The story has less of a religious tone. While Rama is still acknowledged as an avatar of Vishnu, the character that leaps out, captivating your attention is Hanuman. Unmistakable in his mask, only men are allowed to play the him. He’s not Hanuman as we in India know him -  celibate and pious – this Hanuman is a charmer, a romancer, with three wives, and a number of girlfriends.

A favorite story – a dance that I saw performed in both Cambodia and Thailand was of Hanuman and the mermaid. The merpeople carry away the stones for the bridge to Lanka. Hanuman investigates, and finds a beautiful mermaid – Suvarnamaccha – in some stories, actually Ravana’s daughter. He courts her and wins her, and she agrees not to destroy the bridge, and so the army moves on to Lanka.

Like the monkeys of Thailand, Hanuman is everywhere, even where we would not expect to see him; at Suvarnabhumi airport, a large statue, where he’s on the side of the devas, churning the ocean of milk, and the same scene again, at Angkor Wat, in a huge carved mural, not to be missed, right at the back of the temple.

Back in San Fransisco, there is an exhibition in the Asian Art Museum on the Ramayana and its influence across Asia. After another Cambodian dance performance there, I asked the dancer why the story of Hanuman and the mermaid was so popular. “Its how the people make the story their own” she said. The myth, having travelled across the world, has touched people through the centuries, and itself is changed in its turn.

Remembering my Grandmother

It’s been two weeks since my grandmother passed away now, and I’m sitting writing this in the airport.  I learnt about it, when my mother messaged me over Whatsapp, as I was pulling into the parking lot at work. The first thing I tried to do was to call up my parents. My dad was too choked up to talk. And then I cried, briefly, quickly; I had a call I had set up for 9:30 AM that it was too late to cancel. I pulled myself together and took it. I kept my voice low, and I don’t think anyone on the call realized. And then, I sat at my desk, trying to cry quietly, until my manager came and stopped shocked. I cried to her, and then I got back to work, and every hour, every so often, I would find tears rising to my eyes again and again. But the body and mind are resilient, and there’s nothing like burying yourself in work for getting over grief, and the first time I laughed after the news, at a joke that someone told at work, I was shocked; the sound seemed too loud to my ears. I’ve laughed many times since then, with my friends, with my cousins, but sometimes, as I think of her, when someone talks about her, as I write this now, my throat tightens up, and my eyes grow hot.

I guess I didn’t actually believe that she would die so soon. It wasn’t that I thought she was particularly strong – she was delicate and fragile, the volume of her seemed to be made more of the sari she was wearing than flesh and blood. But I guess I thought she wouldn’t die simply because she was mine- my grandmother, and surely, she couldn’t be taken away so quickly, before I saw her one more time, before I was ready to let go. But the truth is, I was never going to be ready to say good-bye. But her death has made the pillars of my world seem a little more brittle, and I look my remaining grandparents with just a little fear, and hold on just a little tighter than I would have a year ago.  The distance between the US and India, bridged so easily by flights, phones and email, suddenly seemed interminable.

She was, as I said, a small person. She lived simply. Her affection was shown in small gestures, nothing effusive; the small box of paal khoa  pressed into my hand as I was leaving; coming home to freshly made fried diamond pakodams.

                                                                                                                          

When I was young, she lived in my uncle’s house. I visited weekly, on Saturday, and she would attempt to teach me the Veena. I was an indifferent student, but she tried her best. She lived in our house in first in Tiruvanmiyur and then, in Alwarpet for many years, and the image of her every morning, playing the Veena in the swami room, humming along, even as her fingers grew stiff, Nuggy watching from the doorway (he wasn’t allowed to enter), sticks with me.

She was very fond of Nuggy, of all my uncle’s dogs, and of animals in general. She’d feed the squirrels and the birds with the leftovers every day. She was often the one to feed Nuggy too, tearing up the chappatti’s into small bits, rolling the rice into little balls, because he was such a spoilt brat of a dog. And if he rebelled, she’d call one of us, to coax him into eating.

When my sister was young, I remember her reading the Narnia books out to her. It didn’t occur to me until many years later, that she too might like reading for its own sake (just like I did), when I saw her reading Jane Austen. Generations, its seems, are not really that far apart.

She had other hobbies as well, crochet, cross-stitch. I don’t know if anything remains in the house of any of the pieces that she did.

 Most of my life, she was active, healthy. She would walk (and sometimes I would go with her, from our house to the bus stand. She’d walk from my uncle’s house to her sister’s place. It was only when she visited me in the US, some years ago, that I realized that age had slowly caught up with her.

We’d gone to Washington D.C. for July 4^th, and walked down to the park to watch the fireworks. She’d leaned on my arm all the way there and back, and for the first time, I realized that age was catching up to her. I wish I’d been a better host that time. I remember not being able to take much time off, searching frantically for some misplaced souvenir, being short and snappish, when we came back from Niagara. The trinket didn’t really matter at all. I wish I’d realized that then.

She and her sister were very close, all the way through to the end. When I was young, I would visit Anamma’s house every weekend; see her and maama; they would reminisce for a while before Appa came. I would pluck pink flowers from the vine in the garden. Kumar Maama would give me stamps. Anamma would give me kalkand when we left. When Anamma grew old, when she could barely recognize anyone else, she always still knew her sister.

Going back for the ceremonies, there is a small absence (she was not a large person), though of course, thoughts of her are more present than ever before. Still, it is jarring as I consciously realize, that I will never again ask where she is (when I go to see her), how she is (over the phone). There is really nothing that I would have said that needed to be said, if I saw her again. Still, I wish I had seen her one more time, spoken to her once more. But once more would never be enough. It will have to be enough.