This has not been a happy New Year. It started with my
grandfather’s death on the 3rd, 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.
