That was my grandmother and that’s how far she got. She came from Tippalakatta village in Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh. The name literally means “a bundle of problems”. She was one of several sisters and brothers and moved away, with marriage, to Vaivaka, another village a hundred kilometres away.
When my uncle turned 12 and my mother three, my grandfather died and then on it was an arduous trail for her as she pulled through life working the small piece of agricultural land she had. Unlettered and ill-equipped, as she was, it was a tough job for her to get work from the field hands. Her neighbours and relatives who admired her pluck at such an early age helped her with the agricultural operations. “Those were the days,” my grandmother would reminisce with tears of gratitude in her eyes, “when lives were lived collectively not singly.”
By the time she came to live with us, she had lost her son and was no longer welcome with his family. I had seen her since childhood, and brave as she was, she put all the tragedy she suffered behind her and helped bring us up, six siblings and a handful, together with my mother. Only the tired, sad lines on her brow and the faraway look in her eyes at a stray moment, gave away the burdens she faced. She had a fecund mind and memory and entertained us with the folklore of the places she lived in, old relatives who passed on, some good, some bad, stories of spirits and other extra-terrestrial beings. There was no trace of rancour in her, nor self-pity, as she told us life should be lived with the good and the bad, with courage and grace.
But the best thing about her was the way she adapted to life in a big city. She was bewildered when she saw the Calcutta traffic, its buses whizzing past and the endless stream of humanity. She wondered how those of us who went out came home at all in one piece. She saw Bengali movies without understanding the story, ate rosagullas with relish and went shopping with my mother for groceries and came back to relate her adventures.
Her biggest moment came when we took her to a picnic atop a double-decker bus and she, with all the imperiousness of a queen, saw the world gliding by.
Yet she was conservative in her tastes and looked at our rising hemlines with alarm, though they were respectably well below the knee. She would mentally compare with the parikini and half-saree my mother would wear in her young days. She thought it was rude to reply to elderly relatives in English as it was tantamount to arrogance. Humility, she said, could come only through the mother tongue.
We laughed at all her idiosyncrasies but are today proud that she passed on to us some of her spirit that could accept life as it is, with extraordinary courage and emotional fortitude.
sudhadevi_nayak@yahoo.com
