Shenbagavalli - Beauty, Intelligence, Kindness
This month’s tenacious woman is a very special person, my maternal grandmother. I’ve written about her here before and that post that took this space to a whole new level. She passed away in 2002, a fairly unexpected turn of events. We don’t know if we were naïve since she had experienced three strokes in two years but my grandmother was my GRANDmother. She wasn’t going to be bogged down by some little stroke. She was strong-willed. But it turns out, the last round of hospitalisation had pretty much weakened her and having lost her own mum just a year ago, my mum and I came to our own conclusion that she just must not have found the resolve to keep going on.
To describe my maternal grandmother, I would have to describe my near 200-year-old ancestral home. As long as she was around, the home felt enormous. And it wasn’t small, to begin with. It felt open. It had sun rays beaming in during the summer, like a scene straight out of a movie. The poojais she did on Tuesdays and Fridays featured the colour of flowers, the aroma of incense sticks and the smoke of sambrani (benzoin resin, another type of incense) that added to the pre-existing warmth and welcoming nature of the house. It all felt so lively you could swear the home had a pulse. After she passed on, it is now a 200-year-old house in ruins. It is dark and dingy. It’s smaller somehow now and not just in terms of size. It feels like there is no space for anything or anyone that you wonder how a minimum of eight people managed to live in the house. And it feels cold and apathetic. It is a mere skeleton with no indication of the glory it once had. It went from "This is Mr. Annamalai (my late grandfather)'s home, right!" to "Is this ... Mr. Annamalai’s house?"
It’s easy to think this is all part of my imagination or that my adoration for my grandmother biased my perspective of the house. I don’t know if that’s true, but all of my mum’s siblings agree that the house just isn’t what it once was; what it was when my grandmother was around. She was the light, the positive energy, and the beauty in the house. And when she left, she took it all with her.
I was 10 when she passed away and I am as fascinated by her as I was then – I don’t know if it was because one of my last memories of her was while she was experiencing a stroke, or because she was such a sharp contrast against my paternal grandmother and most other women I knew of her age, or if it was just my fixation on how one person could dramatically shift the entire energy of a house, a house that had a splendour fit for nobility, overnight. And while I learned about her mostly after she had passed, one thing I know for sure since my earliest memory of her, without a ghost of a doubt, is that she was the toughest woman I’ve ever met. She was from a humble village, a village that had not yet globalised at the speed of its city counterparts. Everyone knew everyone’s business and would come knocking on your door if your house showed no signs of life in the past few hours. The status norm was that boys will be boys, and girls were to be married off. No one argued with that but if my grandmother said differently, no one dared to speak back.
This piece has not been easy for me to write. For the first time in my life, I had no idea where to begin, I couldn’t come up with the answers, and I couldn’t construct a flow. Then I realised the missing piece to this whole thing was my mum – the bridge to my grandmother’s life and my disjointed memories. So, without further ado, this month’s feature is a three-generational story of my grandmother, as recalled by my mother, and told by me.
What did a typical day look like for her?
This was her routine after she considered her three daughters old enough to see through chores around the house and cook meals by themselves. My mum says if she listed out my grandmother’s routine pre-their taking over, we wouldn’t be done today.
0500 Rise + shine! Sweep and clean the entrance of the house and draw a kolam while listening to devotional songs.
0530 Buy and drink tea from a nearby shop (this was considered a very posh act, that she bought tea).
0600 Head out to the backyard to move the cows to the other end of the backyard so that they get the sun, clean the cowshed, and feed the cows.
Sneak in a coffee at around 0700.
Feed the chickens and gather eggs.
Sweep the backyard (a backyard that’s the size of 1.5, maybe 2 football fields) and gather the twigs, wood pieces and logs that have fallen around. Set them out in the sun to dry so that they can be used for the woodstove at home.
Gather any fallen or ripened fruits, vegetables, and coconuts to sell or keep.
Sneak in a tea at 0830.
Supervise/ manage the guy who comes around to pluck coconuts from our trees.
Sell the aforementioned fruits, vegetables, and coconuts as and when people drop by.
Buy leafy greens for the day from the lady who goes from house to house to sell them.
Gather rice, lentils and other dry goods from the kitchen and lay them out in the sun to remove any moisture that gets trapped between them from the humidity so that they don’t spoil.
Set vegetables and batter made the night before to dry to get dried vegetables and fritters to store for everyday cooking and the monsoon season.
0930 Have breakfast.
1000 Drink another tea.
Buy vegetables for the day from the street vegetable seller. In my grandmother’s world, you bought vegetables for the day. This includes onions, tomatoes, ginger and garlic (i.e., the foundation of Indian cooking). Having vegetables leftover for the next day was rare, and almost a disappointment for her so buying vegetables for a couple of days or three, no less a week was unheard of.
Chit chat with the vegetable seller about life for about 30 minutes (who uses this an opportunity to sit for a while and drink some water).
Drink yet another tea at 1030.
1100 Clean and wash the fish that my grandfather had bought or sent over (My mum’s side of the family lived by the sea and ate fish a minimum of three times a week. At this point, I feel obliged to note that while my mum says three, I think it’s more towards 5. They were only vegetarian for religious reasons once a week.)
Drink tea #5 while doing so.
1200 Start cooking. Lunch was often the only meal my grandmother cooked once her daughters were all grown up. And if they had to be vegetarian for religious reasons, my grandmother would let my mum or aunts cook.
1330 Eat lunch.
1400 Move the cows back to their shed. Gather the rice/ lentils/ grains that have dried.
1430 Have a lie-down and read some magazines and the newspaper.
Take a nap at some point.
1600 Sweep the entrance of the house again, clean it again and draw another set of kolam. If asked “Why can’t we just keep the one from the morning, why do we have to draw ANOTHER one?”, she would curtly answer that bad energy (moothevi) would otherwise enter the house.
1630 Clean the cowsheds.
1700 Drink another tea.
1730 Shower/ wash her face, powder face and reapply kungumam.
1800 Drink the last tea for the day and head out to the temple on Tuesdays and Fridays. Other days involved a combination of activities that included, but were not limited to: gather dried vegetables, gather dried wood, make idly/thosai batter, break/ clean lentils so that they were usable for cooking, make brooms for the house (yes, my grandmother made her own brooms).
1900 By now the sun has set and she goes out to sit by the entrance of the house and pretty much zones out. This was her me time. She doesn’t speak to anyone in the house during this time but would chat with anyone passing by on the street.
2015 – 2030 Eats dinner.
2100 Calls it a day.
Based on the season, upcoming festivals, and farming seasons, my grandmother would wake up a lot earlier than 5 am to make food/ fritters/ pickles and do the other things these events required her to. And before she considered her daughters old enough to help around the house, she did all the cooking, the laundry, and all the demands that go with having 8 people in the house by herself. Until towards her last years, she never once hired help because that was a ridiculous concept for her.
How did she keep going?
This was a question my mum and I had to reflect on, consider her 6 pregnancies, the abuse she endured with a grandmother-in-law who stayed with her for 8 years, and her 3 (suspected 4) strokes.
The only question my mum had ever asked that showed my grandmother’s resilience was why she endured the abuse she did (to give an example of how ridiculous that lady was, she wouldn’t even let my grandmother have a drink of water without her knowing. These were days when you had to pump drinking water from somewhere else and store in pots around the house so it wasn’t something you can hide. And she had this habit of going out to chitchat with people at 9 am and not return until 2 pm. This was the case even when my grandmother was pregnant.). My mum wanted to know why she didn’t just leave. My grandmother’s answer was simple. Her mother, i.e., my great grandmother, married at 14 or 15 and lost her husband at 17. After she lost her husband, my great grandmother moved back in with her own family (remarrying was unheard of). So that it doesn’t look like the widow and her young daughter to society. Once she married my grandmother off, my great grandmother went out to live on her own. Had my grandmother moved back in with my great grandmother, the story of the widow and her daughter who “ran away from her husband” would be all there was to talk about in town. My grandmother didn’t want to burden my great grandmother that way – physically and emotionally. And lo and behold, after 8 years, circumstances forced the mean lady to leave the house.
While it sounds like a fairly simple answer and the only answer we have to speak of my grandmother’s tenacity, my mum and I feel like our grandmother had plenty of grit that just runs in the family blood. She was also raised by her grandfather. So in a way, she had what was once described as “masculine” qualities for a person of her time. She was never meek when you look through her wedding photos, she’s not the cowering bride, she didn’t keep her head down as expected of women her time and she spoke in clipped tones that showed she didn’t have time for your nonsense. To her, getting up and going on every single day was the way to go about life. What else can you do? Wallowing was a waste of time that got you nothing.
What was the most misunderstood notion about her?
That she was cold or detached. Because of her short answers and not really being the coddling grandmother, my grandmother was thought to be someone you don’t want to mess with. But it was a wall she built for herself, especially during the 8 hardest years of her life. Ironically, as tough as she was, she could be incredibly naïve towards those who feigned love or concern. And she was a big softie. She just had a tough manner of speaking.
What was her favourite item in her house?
Her wedding saree and her mum’s wedding saree that she kept under lock and key. We have no idea where either of those items is now. She made all three daughters wear her wedding saree during their engagement ceremonies.
What was her passion or hobby?
She went to the marketplace by herself once a month. She would catch the 5 pm train to get there, and the 8 pm train to get back to her hometown. What did she do close to 3 hours at a marketplace? Shopping for beads and fabrics that her daughters had asked for; she didn’t have many hobbies of her own but she continuously nurtured her daughters to find something for themselves. She would buy snacks for six kids. She would occasionally buy pots or pans for the house that were the “latest” in design (Having to keep up with the fashion trends for pots and pans seems like such a wild concept for me. Especially since my grandmother’s utensils were either stainless steel or clay.) Every 2 to 3 months she would go visit her mum and stay there for about three to four days.
If you ask me, the one thing she was really committed to as a form of the hobby was to stretch out on our thinnai (a raised porch at the entrance of the house where you can sit) and sell eggs, milk, coconuts and vegetables and fruits of the season that were from our backyard. It wasn’t entirely about the money she made as the prices she charged her customers were entirely dependent on the customer. Someone might ask for a coconut and she would throw in an extra coconut, a piece of pumpkin, some curry leaves, and a banana for free. But she would charge some people two rupees for just one coconut. She also consistently reserved some of her eggs and citrons for a Muslim neighbour during their fasting month and accepted the biryani they would send over as payment. Granted, this served as a way to be able to afford the little knickknacks she bought her children, but it seems like it was more about the idea of selling or having things to sell rather than profits and money.
What brought joy to her?
My mum thinks it’s what she did for her children. One thing my grandmother very much enjoyed doing was to go out and buy exactly what her children asked for; clothes, fabric, and beads and threads her children asked for their hobbies that matched their description to a T. And she would be happy to go out to the marketplace as many times as necessary until she found what she was looking for. My mum says my grandmother has never once bought back the wrong shade or told them to make do with something that was close enough to what they had expected. It was always what my mum had pictured like my grandmother was some sort of mind reader. The whole thing sounds like a hunt to me, my grandmother manually walking in and out of the many stores and repeatedly describing what they had wanted until she found the right one. The fact that this was all pre-internet and the ability to send your mum a picture of what you want just boggles my mind.
What would she have wanted to be known for?
She was not one who fussed about having to be known. And it was not something we had an opportunity to ask her about because she herself didn’t see the inevitable coming. All she kept saying towards the end was that she just wanted her right arm fixed, as it had weakened from the effects of the repeat strokes. She wanted to cook her own food. She wanted to cook food for those she loved. She had plans to marry off all 6 children, help them out with raising their children, and her version of “retirement plans” – to spend the rest of her days raising cows to sell or to be the middle person in the buying and selling of rice grains (we had land that we gave to someone to farm on, so she had ideas of making it bigger).
What does the word “tenacity” mean to her?
My mum and I both agree that the word tenacity itself refers to my grandmother. And that if we said this to her, we would have gotten a dismissive tart remark or a scoff in return. From my grandmother’s point of view, she simply lived. But when my mum and I face difficult times, we tell ourselves if she (and my great grandmother) could live through what she did, so could we. This was a woman who shocked her own doctor by getting up and walking around and doing manual laundry after her third stroke.
What advice would she have given to another woman?
My grandmother was not one to dole out advice. But there were two things she drilled into our heads and was stubborn about. Both converged into the concept of having an identity of our own, one that did not depend on the husband a woman married.
The first was to have an education. At a time where people around her married their daughters off as soon as they hit puberty, or “later” at the 10th standard (which was still just 15-16 years of age), my grandmother was insistent her daughters study and graduate what is called “+2”, a form of higher secondary education (17-18 years of age). Her rationale was that the SSLC certificate obtained at completing the 10th standard wouldn’t get them anything while a +2 education could guarantee an entry into a skills-based training school or the opportunity to pursue a degree by mail at the least (pursuing a degree by mail as people limited sending girls out of the house after they hit puberty).
The second was to be independent. She was insistent that apart from education, her daughters learned something they could do with their hands – baking, sewing, knitting, etc. She believed that no matter how much income your husband makes or how much gold your parents gave you when they married you off, it was important you made some money for yourself, no matter how little, and kept it for yourself.
What is a significant memory my mum has of my grandmother and me?
I asked this mainly to annoy my mum but ended up experiencing a flurry of emotions.
Although my grandmother has always been a detached figure, she couldn’t hold herself against babies (especially a baby as adorable as me. Hehe.) So she often chatted away at babies while they cooed back at her. On one such occasion, my mum saw my grandmother telling me that I would one day be decked out in gold (an expression that means you would be blessed with abundance) while giving me a bath. Back then my parents were still in India, living on a fairly small income so of course, my mum dubiously asked, “How so?” My grandmother smugly replied “Oh, she will. And you will see. And if not you, she will marry someone who could.” Shortly after, my dad got the offer to move to Singapore and our living conditions improved considerably, to say the least. I may not be decked out in gold today, and to be fair, I don’t know if I ever would because I just don’t get the whole gold thing, but I am undeniably blessed with abundance - through my dad’s perseverance, my own hard work, and the love I feel from a grandmother even when she's no longer here. Just like she said I would.
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