Tuesday, October 07, 2003
nani in winter
i remember the smell of my grandmother's ponds cold cream that she would apply to her face and hands carefully every evening at 4:00 pm even if she was not planning to go out.
i remember her watching soccer and boxing on tv. cheering the players on while she sat on her enormous bed with a pot of burning coals next to her to keep her warm. i remember knowing even as young as 6 or 7 years old, that it was unusual for a grandmother to be interested in contact sports.
i remember her warning us from the balcony upstairs not to mix with the other children in the neighborhood. she was always loud enough for all of us to hear her clearly. i remember those wiry and street-smart children sneering: "go home."
i remember her repeating at opportune moments this following statement aimed as a threat to my nana: "the day i make a killing at the derby, i will leave this filthy, cruel man (my nana) forever". i remember we didn't have race tracks in the city anymore.
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i remember the smell of her cooking on eid day. the mutton korma that has never smelled the same way since she died.
i remember her admonishing us - the children of the ones who stayed - to keep our hands off the toys and effects of the children of those who had left. i remember her waiting for the ones who went away to return.
i remember her calling me after exams and asking: "did you write down all the answers carefully, shona-manik?"
every year we would go at least once to belly nani's house the day she trimmed the bay leaf tree. i remember wondering what possible difference bay leaves made in food preparation. every time i use them in cooking now, i remember the car load of fresh bay leaves we would haul home from kakrail.
on the afternoons that we had some hindi video to watch, i remember her asking: "is that tall boy in it?" she had a thing for amitabh bachchan.
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i remember her sipping tea from a glass that people in our city normally use for drinking water. at 11:00 am, she would sit at the dining room table with her tea, adding cinnamon and butter for flavor, unlike anyone else i knew at the time. she would smear a little butter over last night's chapati and sprinkle some sugar on top. rolling it up, like a fajita, she would dip it in her cup of aromatic tea and smile. years later, in the mountains of darjeeling, i drank the same kind of tea and felt like i was home.
i remember her coming back from the diabetic hospital one day and telling us how uncaring and obnxious nana had been to her the whole time they were out. she told us how he had walked in front of her, not caring to see if she could keep up with him. and then, in the middle of on-coming traffic he had crossed a busy intersection without waiting for her. confused and lost, she had used the end of her sari to cover her head and had run (a running woman on the streets of our native city is an unusual sight, and she was about 50 at the time) in front of the trucks and buses to follow him to the other side, clutching the folder full of her medical papers in her hand. she had chuckled through this whole account. i remember how sad the look on her face had been.
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i remember the day they woke me up from sleep and asked me to get dressed. when we got to the old house, she was in front of me and people i didnot know were stiing around her, crying. i remember thinking to myself: "oh god, what if i cant cry?"
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i remember her saying sometimes: "the day all the crows gathered on the roof, i knew my mother was dead." on rare moments, she mentioned a brother who had gone to war and who, as a child, would beat her up for being a slow-learner.
decades later, that same brother wrote to her a letter in their native language (which none of her progeny understood). by then, she had been dead for 5 years. that is the day i knew what her given name had been.
