Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children. - Alex Haley
I miss going to the market place with my grandfather - holding his hand and watching him bargain with the shopkeepers. He would patiently explain how to pick the best vegetables from the lot.
"The pahakais should be medium green with as few bumps as possible. The dark green, bumpy ones are very bitter. You will not like the pitlai if its bitter now, will you?"
"The vendakai should be very tender. Do you know how to test if you picked the right one? Try bending the end of the lady finger. If it breaks off, its not as good. Paati makes the best vendakai curry, dont you think?"
Little did I realize that the object of my adoration would hear a few words from my grandmother once we got home and grandly produced the wares.
"Why did you get beans again?" "These pahakais look so sullen. And the vendakais look crunchy!" "Did you forget the keerai? I told you to get the menthiya keerai..." Fortunately, I was too young to realise that my grandfather was not the best shopper. I did not know this till much later, when my mother mentioned it in one our trips down memory lane. As far my young self was concerned, my grandfather could not do anything wrong.
I read somewhere that grandmas are moms with lots of frosting. My grandmother was a gentle soul. She did not say a single word when I plastered her hair with chewing gum while she was sleeping. My mother, on the other hand, was a totally different story while she cut off clumps of my grandma's hair. I remember that Paati would sit down with the 'aruvamanai' to cut mangoes into chunks for lunch. As I passed by, she would plant a mango piece in my palm - "Wash your hands after you eat that." We would wait for the power to go off at night-time. Crazy thought - now that I think of it - but no lights meant that there would be no serving at dinner. I do not know what the adults did, but dinner for the children was either outside on the patio or on the terrace. All the children would sit in a semi circle around my grandmother. She would make balls out of the prepared curd rice and plant it in each of our outstretched palms. She would wait for us to make a small indentation in the middle of the rice. She would then pour a little 'kozhambu' in it. We would take a bite of our 'narthanga' and gobble the rice up. Under the serene moonlight, even prasadam from the temple could not have been this divine.
I do not remember all that happened in my life, but it is amazing how the littlest of things gets stuck, somewhere in the crevices of my memory. And it is a magnificent discovery when I dig it out. One such discovery permanently archived in my memory is the "gudu-gudu-pandi" incident. For those of you who do not know what a "gudu-gudu-pandi" is, let me explain. They are gypsies who travel door to door telling fortunes for some money. They annouce their arrival at your door by jiggling their damrus - hour glass shaped drums- and loud singing in a dialect I could not follow. All the young things in the house were mortally scared of "gudu-gudu-pandis". Why? Because our mothers had told us that we had not been behaving like proper little children and that he was here to pick us up. That did not stop us from stealing glances at the quaint gypsy folk. Strings of beads around their necks, colorfully quilted rags - they did not look normal - so we were inclined to believe our mother's were telling the truth. At the sound of the damru at our neighbor's house, we would make a sprint to our grandmother. Somehow we knew she would not let us be taken away. We were not so sure about our mothers. At the sight of those frightened imploring eyes, my grandmother would shout at my mother. "Why do you scare little children like this? Go and give him some money and tell him that we dont have any bad children here." Yes, we knew we could count on her.
Years passed, I spent many a happy summer with my grandparents. At the end of every summer, when it was time to head back to school and 10 months of mundane life, it was always a painful parting. I would wave goodbye to my grandparents standing on the railway platform - bravely holding back glistening tears which refused to pop back in. Once the train started moving I would head up to the top berth and pretend to fall asleep - only then granting freedom to my tears. I did not want to them to know I was going to cry myself to sleep that night. I did not think they would miss me. But I sure was going to miss them and could not wait to see them again next year.
I was old enough to realise that people die. But I was still too young to comprehend what it was that I was going to lose. My mother had to leave in a hurry. I could see that she had been crying when I came back from school. My father told me that my grandmother had passed away. I said "OK, so are you also going with Amma?" It had not sunk in that I would not be seeing my grandmother again.
It struck me only when I went back for the summer. Everything seemed a little different. My grandfather seemed different. My mother and my aunts seemed different. The food was definitely different. I had lost my first grandparent.
As I grew older, vacations were spent improving myself academically. There was no time to waste two whole months on fun and frolic. Visits to my grandfather became shorter and less frequent.
Then, as if it all happened in one day, the soft patient voice began to slur. The swift sure feet began to wobble. The broad straight shoulders dropped. The sharp mind that could rattle off numbers and propose tax benefits to worried businessmen began to dull. I was losing my grandfather. He had withered away right before my eyes. I was going to lose another grandparent.
Grandparent-less I am now.
Glossary:
pahakai = bitter gourd
vendakai = lady finger
pitlai = vegetable gravy with coconut base
paati = grandmother
menthiya keerai = methi greens
aruvamanai = cutting tool with a blade attached at about 120 deg angle to a wooden base, used to cut vegetables and grate coconut
kozhambu = gravy, prepard with tamarind juice and spices
narthanga = dried and salted sweet lime pickle
prasadam = prasad, food offered to the devotees at the temple
Amma = mother
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