Remembering Meenakshi Paati

By JF on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - 22:37

Mother’s day has just gone by. We’ve all had our fill of saccharine sweet images of “mum.” Seldom do we hear people talk about women in their families beyond their cooking skills or their sacrifices. Krish Ashok goes beyond the cliché and tells us about the person that was Meenakshi, his grandmother. The woman who herself was anything but your conventional “paati.”

As I sit here, in yet another quintessentially Tambram function, observing several folks busying themselves with rituals, odd jobs and other paraphernalia, listening to brusque orders given by a couple of priests who are constantly interrupted by their mobile phones with custom sloka ringtones, I almost entirely forget that the event is actually a funeral. Tambrams have a way of turning every festival, every celebration and even death into a homogenous sequence of homams (havans), coconuts, kalasams (brass vessels), priests and arcane minutiae in no particular order. Somebody who isn’t steeped in this tradition can easily confuse a wedding with a funeral.

I suppose that an ailing 93 year old’s death is, in a strangely rational way, not an occasion for too much grief. In fact, the person who just died used to tell me that the 2 week sequence of highly elaborate rituals that happen post-death serve the social function of diminishing grief as it keeps people busy while letting the oldest psychological medicine in the world, time, do its work. This 93 year old was my paternal grandmother, Meenakshi. As a child growing up in a family where both parents worked, I (and my brothers) are products, entirely of her upbringing. Her child rearing philosophy was simple - let kids do whatever the hell they wanted (barring physically dangerous stunts) and learn from their mistakes. No mollycoddling, pampering or closeting of any kind.

Meenakshi Paati (or simply Paati as we knew her) was born in 1917 in Nagercoil, then part of the Travancore state in British-India and spent the best time of her life going to a convent school for a brief period till she was ready to be married off. Notice how we Indians say “I got my daughter married off”, with the “off” serving to indicate the transfer of property rights over a human being to the groom’s family. One day, when she as 13, she was asked to serve a not-so-young gentleman visitor some coffee, which she did and then asked her grandmother who the man was. She was told that the 31 year old widower that she had just served coffee to was going to be her husband. She protested but some “bug” in her horoscope meant that she had to get married to a widower to stave off malefic effects.

She had her first child when she was 15 and by the age of 25, her family was complete with 5 children, the youngest being my father. She ran a household with 20 children as she took into her fold several nephews and nieces who had lost their mothers early. Her husband ran a thriving petrol pump business in Tirunelveli before letting the depression arising from the questionable death of his eldest daughter at her in-laws place run his business to the ground, taking with it all land, savings and towards the end, Meenakshi’s jewellery as well. She finally left Gopalasamudram, where she had lived for over 50 years of her life, and moved in with my father at Madras in 1971.

What I find remarkable about her was her sense of wonder at the world that never diminished despite the early loss of her father, the grind of married life, the cruel culling of her desire for education (she loved reading), the multiple tragedies of one mentally retarded son and the suspicious death of her favourite (and pregnant) daughter at her in-laws place and the financial woes of her late husband. Her greatest strength was the ability to not be rigid about anything, not her beliefs, not tradition or for that matter, her opinions.

Uncharitable people might call her naive, but I prefer to call it a constant belief in the possibility of progress. Having seen a light bulb only when she as 60 or so, she did not, like most other people from her generation, close herself from science and technology and live in an artificial world of their own, frozen in time at the moment of their greatest level of comfort. She continued to wonder at how large objects lift themselves off the ground, how TV works and how operations could fix her cataract problems. About 7-8 years ago when I video chatted with her for the 1st time on Skype from the US, the 86 year old Meenakshi Paati’s immense curiosity and wonder were still there. When I came back to India, she wanted to understand how this internet thing works, and if 7 year olds could have a tenth of her enthusiasm to learn about the brave new world that’s always beyond the horizon of their current level of understanding, they’d all become astronauts and video game designers.

Her proudest moment was when one of her granddaughters went the IIT-IIM route and landed a job whose starting salary continued to amaze her till the very end of her life. Many women from her generation silently feel proud of their daughters’ achievements but somehow are still reluctant to change the marriage-resign-deliver-kids routine that women are consigned to. When she saw what her granddaughter had achieved, she was quick to adapt her advice to young girls, asking them not to ignore their careers. When successful career women advice young girls this way, it’s good for them, but it’s only when women like my grandmother, who’ve never experienced financial independence in their lives undergo this shift of mindset that serious change becomes possible.

I’d call her highly tolerant and broadminded, but those are vapid expressions that don’t capture the essence of a complex human being. The best I can do is say that she was alive to possibilities. In the back of her mind, despite what tradition demanded of her, she knew that all of these rituals and customs were obsolete bunkum, frozen in their own time, reluctant to be contemporarily relevant, but she was never brazen in her opposition to them. She played along and was a model, nine-yard-saree wearing woman who enjoyed MS Subbulakshmi while secretly admiring Michael Jackson because in her mind, she still believed that Jackson had overcome the barriers of slavery to be successful. 

She was a voracious reader. As long as her eyes held out, she had a book in her hand. For someone who studied till class 7 before getting married, it’s incredible that she could read Tamil, Malayalam, English and Sanskrit and while she enjoyed RK Narayan and Sudha Murthy for their simplicity, she never shied away from trying to read heavier tomes in English. In keeping with her philosophy, she never gave up reading anything she did not grasp. She lived her life with the constant assumption that there will always be new and exciting things that she may never understand and, like her response to rock music, she refused to criticize things she did not fully appreciate.

Another unique way in which she was different from the rest of her generation was her private belief that “old was not gold”. She was more the “old is mold” sort of person. Her only problem with modern times was the cost of stuff. She preferred the trappings of modern life but wished that gold would cost the same Rs 13 for 8 grams that it did back when her grandfather made jewellery for her. Inflation is one of those concepts I was never able to convincingly explain to her (apart from why the Software industry pays its employees so much), but perhaps that reveals my ignorance of economics more than her inability to understand it.

She was a story teller par extraordinaire. Every lunch of mine from when I was a year old to a shameful 11 years old was accompanied by a side dish of enthralling tales from the epics, stories from Vikatan she read and even randomly made up tales featuring me and my brothers as heroes (Yes, we liked hearing those). I would also ask her to tell me tales from the Asura perspective, and she would, without telling me off for preferring the dark side.

Most Tambrams associate their grandfathers with Hindu crosswords, Wordsworth, Test match cricket and a passionate love for intellectual pursuits. Most grandmothers are remembered for their killer Sambar, special avials and delectable snacks. Meenakshi was never interested in cooking. She had managed a household of some 20 kids and her sense of proportion of salt and spices never really re-adjusted to a small nuclear family, but I will only remember her for the vastness of her knowledge (ah, the number of times she has politely corrected pompous maamas’ pronunciations on tradition and custom), and the boundless curiosity that lulled everyone into thinking that she was simply yet another behind-the-scenes denizen of the kitchen.

This post first appeared in Krish Ashok’s blog. He Heads Web 2.0 R&D for in Indian IT major and is a blogger, a passionate open source enthusiast and an amateur Rubyist (the programming language, not the gem). He used to be a Radio Jockey with Chennai Live 104.8 and is a columnist for Indian Express, Cricinfo and Sify. He uses his day job to fund his numerous hobbies and one day hopes to publish agrand unified theory of how to achieve a state of constructive leisure while at work.