A Grandmother remembered

-- by V.Vijaysree, v.vijaysree@gmail.com

“Don’t come too close,” our normally affectionate grandmother would beseech us. (mela padadhey, mela padadhey 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. 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. She looked elegant even in hereveryday white-dotted sungudi saris: a standout and a stereotypical Patti at the same time.

All Pattis are good cooks, aren’t they? Mine made classic paal payasam and delicious instant mango pickle. When those 2-minute noodles first appeared on the market, she said, “Maggi is just plumper semiya,” and proceeded to make a slithery upma of it. Patti had her own “tastemaker,” a signature blend of spice powders for many dishes. With cardamom and only smidgeons of saffron, nutmeg, or tricky green camphor, she also 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 which came to an end 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 and their home would earn a reputation for hospitality. House guests staying for varying lengths of time, including young women who enrolled in colleges, could rely on Patti for hot meals and a kind word. Patti, with her pleasant smile, served daily visitors excellent coffee.

Good coffee 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 the R.K. Narayan novel The Painter of Signs. Having taken care of her nephew for many years, she 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 widowed aunt. She had stood beside the cow at dawn, watching the milk pail to make sure the milk remained undiluted.

The aunt tells the nephew she has stocked gingelly oil for at least six months, but he must see to it that the lid of the jar is taken off for a few minutes, once a week, so the oil doesn’t turn rancid. He must ensure that insects don’t get in when the lid is open. And she asks him to air the pickles and preserves at least once in ten days. There was enough stock of dried vegetables to last him for two years.

“Don’t waste any of it,” the industrious aunt tells him before embarking on her journey. Our industrious Patti thought similarly. Forget all the prayers, fasting, and other rituals they observed, a strict zero-waste policy seems to have been the true guiding mantra of women of that era. They were into sustainability long before it became fashionable.

The physical and emotional labor put in by the women in charge of feeding a multi-generation family in those days boggles the mind. They also did a ton of non-culinary work ranging from everyday chores to whatever needed to be done to secure the family’s future. 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 for reading.

After Patti had passed on, the items she had diligently collected over a lifetime were divided among the appropriate relatives. On that occasion, when I was handed 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, filled with news about family!

At some point Patti seems to have gotten into the habit of organising 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 graduation robes. 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 from/of my aunt, a graduate of the College of Engineering, Guindy, and another aunt who was as outspoken as Patti was quiet.

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 even happier when the world acknowledged their work. And 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 them for granted, and as for the smaller things about her, mostly, we never thought to ask. A first-person account of a different way of life is now lost to me. I am left with no idea of the times, the people, or the place that shaped her. I have never been to Nemmeli. How did Patti see the changing world?

What was Patti’s first phone call like? When Patti briefly set up a home of her own, what was it like to hear her aunt-cum-mother-in-law’s instructions through this instrument? One evening, in recent years, when I held up the smart phone for a selfie, and asked her to smile, she responded with, “Who smiles without a reason?” This, for some reason, made me grin. And the laughter must have been infectious because Patti began to grin. 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 called Rosie the Riveter became a powerful recruitment tool and an American cultural icon.

These women 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, 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 no less valiant a thing to do. We simply don’t know much about the personal histories of our grandmothers, and how they adapted to difficult situations.

In our fair city, few streets are named after women who resided there. Even the tradition of naming grandchildren after a Patti has all but ended. Who wants to saddle their daughter with an old-fashioned name from the epics? Our own family may never see another Savithri again.

Through Lucy, the cartoonist Charles Schulz was reminding us, self-absorbed grandchildren of the world to be more curious about the contribution of women to twentieth century society.

If your Patti is still around, do ask her questions. Even if your grandmother was not a historical figure, you will, no doubt, be surprised and delighted by what you learn about her. With any luck, you could catch a fleeting glimpse of your Patti as a little girl.

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