Before I must start to write about this, please know, that it’s not a moral-based writeup, or rather it might not make sense to a lot of you who do not know me or this other woman that I am writing about. It is just my story and maybe bits of what I feel about this woman and some bits of my relationship with her– Although these words will never be able to make justice to what she was.
The other thing that I’d like of course to mention is the age gap between us is 68 years. She was 68 when I was born, and this is our journey beyond the age of 68 to 97 which recently she was at. On the 22nd of August 2022, she left me and millions of her memories behind.
It is simply a put sentence that says my grandmother had an unconventional bond with almost all the people in her life. She liked maybe only like 5 out of 100 people she met in her life, and fortunately or so, I was a part of those 5. Partially, this was also because my father was her youngest and the most loved child*. He spent all his living years with her, and they were the version of can’t do with you and cannot do without you, to everyone around.
Aaji was named Malini from her birth, and post her marriage, she became Veena G. Sumbha. She was ideally very educated, self-sufficient for herself right from a young age, and was true to her work. I spent a lot of time with her as a child during vacations – the usual grandmother-granddaughter bond, she making amazing food or plating my hair, or just us watching tv or she scolding my dad when he used to ask me to study. But we grew closer, and like thick closer only when my father passed away. It was surreally special and the last three years of my life became conveniently easy to live because she made it even easier.
I think at some part of my heart, I also had it in me to be around her as much, that is what my father would have done if he were alive. She also started loving my mother differently and with me, she saw a version of her always. When I was growing up, she always said, I am like her mother Janhvi. In recent years she used to mention, that she looked exactly like me, when she was young (Not to forget, she mentioned that she was much more beautiful.)
She had innumerable stories to tell, how she worshipped her work as a teacher of English and Sanskrit, how she played cards with British officers, and how she used to answer them back in English right on their faces. Many of the poems in English that I remember after so many years even today are all because she made me learn those. She told me, that of the two great Jacobean tragedies written by Shakespeare, Hamlet is greater, Macbeth is darker, and she loved the prior..
While I am writing this, I am also humming – ‘’ Lightly, O lightly we bear her along’’, Palanquin Bearers, a poem by Sarojini Naidu, a poem Aaji made me byheart when I was in class 4. Around 2007, we moved full-time with Aaji. Our evenings were about reciting Ram Raksha. I think I still remember the first 10 stotras. On my tenth board, I scored 100 in Sanskrit, I think she started loving me a lot more post it. During one of the school competition stints, she also taught me a stotra ‘Vande TavaPadyugalam Devi Sharade’ I won a prize for. For someone who maybe did her early schooling in the 1930s and to remember this 85 90 years later looks astounding to me. I think I will never be getting these tunes out of my head.
Aaji had her fair share of good and not so good deeds like all of us, humans. But, at the end of it all, she lived her life like the queen she was, with zero regrets. She taught me to live up to my thoughts, and more so, to take life with fewer holding backs, and of course to make the most of the knowledge that one can consume. She read the newspaper every day and her curiosity about politics, films, and Arts was magnificent. During the time when Vidya Balan had a release named, The Dirty Picture, I remember, she expressed she wanted to see it, and a few days later we saw it together on TV. It was always so cool.
We never got along on many of her ethics and thoughts, I think nobody did. But, I have not made a lot of effort in convincing her or proving that she’s wrong. I mostly let things go and I think she knew I ignore it all. Last year, when I went to meet her once and she was ranting about something that did not make sense, was the only time, I answered her back and told her she is wrong, and I left the house. She video-called me a week later and cried (not saying sorry, just crying.) Drama runs in the genes, especially this is where I get it from.
Two hours before she passed away around 12 AM, I left her house to rest for a while and went to mine. She was keeping unwell for a long time, but this night was different. I felt severe anxiety and chest pain and I kept whatsapping my mother, who was beside my Aaji that I am unable to sleep, and some severe uneasiness got into my head. I was sitting with a cup of milk when mom called up to tell aaji left. It felt like the start of a new day at 1.45 AM when she passed away, but the end of an entire era for me. In the next ten minutes, we reached her house which seemed pale and empty in a difference of 2 hours. My father’s photo on the wall seemed blurry to me, and Aaji was at peace on her bed. If there was a moment to describe, what the end of an entire childhood meant to you, it was this for me.
I have several photos and videos of hers. Every time I put a camera on her face, she hated it, but she posed back in 5 seconds, something I always knew. She used to call my yellow nail polish jaundice and my red hair, copper wires. She always asked me the flight fare every time I visited her, something I’d regret because she wanted to always travel through a flight.
Her other regret and mine too is always going to be that she wanted to see me getting married, she had been insisting it since the past few years now, but she was also chill about my choice of marrying a couple of years later as well, which was always refreshing. Some months back, we celebrated her birthday, and I gave her the gift she wanted, a photo of me and my sister’s graduation along with hers. I will never forget her smile when she opened the gift wrap. Till her last breath, she kept the photo right on her bed, close to her heart, and now that frame hangs up on my wall at my house. Some things are forever, isn’t it?
Sometimes, I feel if my father would have been alive, she would have crossed 100 of her age easily, but to say she lived for 97 years, is itself a deal in herself. I always thought of her as an immortal soul, someone who’d always be there with me and I’d always go to meet her, pluck guavas from the tree and lemons and she’d make pickle. So, thinking she has left, still feels surreal because how can Aaji go? She is gonna be here!
Wherever she is, I want her to know, her spirit lives in me and will live as long as I live, and I will pass the best of her life lessons to the generation here on. They don’t make them like her anymore, and I can only say I am lucky to have been blessed with some of her many lessons and to have known her, mere being a granddaughter is a fortune in itself.
At the end of it all, it is an incomprehensible love story between her and me.
