A Tale of Two Grandmothers
On the Women Who Made Me and The Stories They Told
Nani
Nani (pronounced naah-nee) is the Northern Hindustani term for “maternal grandmother.” For some, the term conjures up softness wrapped in shawls to spite the heat of Indian summers. To me, it sounds sharp: more like pointed, precise, purposeful. Painfully and permanently practical.
Nani was fierceness personified, the kind that never lost its strength despite being stretched across what seemed an oxymoronic sea between rationale and faith. That she was an OB/GYN who practiced reiki will never cease to confuse me. That she could at the drop of a hat access a mental database of what seemed like a billion stock Aesopian aphorisms (“A moment on your lips — forever on your hips,” was my Mom’s favorite and my least favorite) and live her life between these many maxims never ceased to impress and inundate me. Her pride in being the ugliest and smartest of her seven sisters inspired me as a smart, chubby child, but makes me cringe with a weird mixture of pity and envy as a too-self-aware, chubby adult.
She did deserve to be proud though: Nani was really fucking smart, yo. I mean, really. Not that I could engage her on a large number of topics that she could school me on (not that she would necessarily want to engage a pugnacious granddaughter she only saw every few years in random debates), but for her to have been a top-ranking doctor in a hospital for decades in India was amazing. Whether she was motivated by her self-described plainness or by her Oxford-educated patrilineage or some combination thereof, it was clear that there was something special beyond the already impressive dint of her hard work.
Yet there was something to be said for the way my Nani was proud: her accomplishments were always cited as points of instruction, prescriptions even. Her wealth of bookish knowledge could have been shamelessly and breezily paraded through conversations, and even if we all knew it was there, we (at least I) never saw terribly much of it. I can remember her during family conversations at the dinner table sitting and watching quietly with a smile while the rest of us tore into each other playfully. Her past was shrouded in outwardly reflective, forward-looking steely logic: she was the ugly sister when I needed to study harder, the bearer of burdens when I needed to be better.
The last time I saw Nani was in the winter of 2013, as I was just beginning to feel the initial effects of PTSD. Mom had sent me on a mission to collect her life story so that I could write a little pamphlet or mini-biography. You see, Nani was a Partition survivor. She had been forced to leave her home in beautiful Lahore to live in shanty border camps for months without proper food, water, electricity. She had lived through immense trauma. And while my mother needed her to tell her story so that it could be documented for posterity, I needed her to be a survivor so I could learn how to be a survivor.
We sat on her bed as she tore up old photographs of people she didn’t know but whose faces she inexplicably had decades-old photos of (she gave me some only when I convinced her I could sell them on the Internet. Like I said, painfully practical). I know that if I had told her about what I had gone through, it would have broken her heart. But I wonder that if I had told her, would she have maybe dropped her story like one of her many aphorisms, thoughtful, relevant, and poignant? Instead, we sat and talked stiffly. Despite her knowing my love of history, she gave me the barest of details, enough to construct a timeline, but nothing to color it in. I was reminded of a study about Holocaust survivors where it was determined that men and women told their stories differently — men focused on logistical concrete details and women focused on their emotions and reactions. Nani told her story like a man. And I walked away filled with more questions than answers, questions that would never be answered and I didn’t quite know how to ask. I wish I had been her friend when she was young and learned to survive in the formulaic generous way that she did
She sobbed into my hands as I left her the next morning and told me she loved me so much and would miss me. I loved her so much and would miss her too. And all I knew of her were the parts she revealed so that I could earn the happiness she wanted me to have.
Amma
Amma (pronounced umm-ah) is the pan-Indian term for “mother”. To me, it is the incorrect term my cousins and I used to call my paternal grandmother. But what else would I call her? What other word sounds the way a delicate bird feels nestled into itself as comfortably and quietly as it can with a sparkle in its eyes.?
Amma could be accurately described by the Sanskrit/Telugu term karunāsāgarā, an ocean of compassion. My Dad warned that when she was younger, Amma had her fair share of stormy moments, which I didn’t blame her for (Dad sounded like he was a handful). But to me, she was tranquil, calm, deceptively simple and shimmering on the surface for miles around. Occasionally, her quick wit — sometimes cute, sometimes sly — would ripple forth: once, when I was staring at copperheads in our garden from a distance, she ran her finger up my spine and giggled when I jumped. She also once told me my butt looked like a pumpkin, and I didn’t know whether to pout or laugh (today, after my Abs & Glutes class, I do a little of both). But whenever I cried, she would be there teaching me how useful a sari was as her own was served up to my face, a personal handkerchief, as she chanted “Yedakku. Yedakku.” Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
Despite a language barrier between us, Amma felt like my portal to a world I desperately wanted to know. She indulged me with story after story about her childhood, how she was the best high jumper in the school, how she was miserable at English and could only be lured to lessons with the promise of chocolate (same, girl), and even how whenever she had her period, all she wanted to do was stay in the bathroom for the whole week (SAME, GIRL). We watched old Telugu songs and Tom & Jerry together like she did when she was younger. We picked jasmine flowers; it was our favorite scent. She would help me practice classical music and tell me when I was off-pitch, even though she wasn’t super classically-trained herself. I knew her father died when she was 8, she was married when she was 16 to my 48-year old grandfather, and that her husband died leaving her with three children and plunging her into poverty when she was 36. Knowing these experiences — good, bad, and incomplete- surely felt like knowing everything about her.
Her Alzheimer’s had begun setting in before my PTSD did. She was still mostly happy, although my parents told me that in her lucid moments, she would be distraught. It reminded me of the time our dog Kiefer chewed up an expensive rug, and fearing the consequences, Amma began to cry and ask me what she had done to deserve all these horrible things in her life. My Mom came home and was immediately startled to discover both of us crying into each other in the living room.
Nothing was sadder to me than seeing her sad, and it was never just about the rug. But while she remained emptily buoyant through losing her memory, my brain was a nervous typhoon of self-blame and fear, rethinking hungry men’s eyes and hands that had laid upon an attractive young lady, single and alone in a country rife with misogyny.
I couldn’t ask her what to do. Not even if she was able to remember herself. The twenty-year gap between my grandfather passing and me being born was an unspoken silence that I could only pray was alright when I knew it couldn’t have been. I wished I could have been her friend when she was young in the South India that she described with such vibrant detail so that we could have worn saris together and I could have laid the soft absorbent cotton on her face if she ever needed it.
Amma would bless me before I left the house to go back to college. It started off as a shtick — we both thought touching elders’ feet was uptight, and she responded with the most antiquated sesquipedalian benedictions just to prove the point. Even when we were being pulled apart, I only knew the parts of her that were too light and airy and fine to be steeped in staidness, even if she always had to be.
Me
When I tell stories, I remind myself of my grandfathers. The paternal one was a playwright and poet who was working on his autobiography when he passed away. Though I’ve never met him, I’ve seen his movies and been compared to him (favorably and unfavorably) enough to know that he must have been pretty damn expressive. The maternal one was a businessman, but I always knew him for his warmth that was somehow scruffy but gentle, boisterous yet polished. One time, without us even asking for it, he told my sister and I about what it felt like to do opium, hilariously belying his vain “I’ve heard that…” with so much [un]necessary detail.
Because like my grandfathers, my instinct is to overshare. It has made my family blush, friends roll their eyes, and pretty much everyone else wonder what the fuck is wrong with me. I’m sure there have been people who don’t know how to respond to my irreverent humor, my politically-minded indignance, or my weird stories (although, for the record, don’t plan on ever being in an opium den). Yup, their storytelling styles are clearly mine.
My traumas and my struggles, however, were, are, and will be like my grandmothers’. Like them, I live in a man’s world where we can only be taken seriously if we prove ourselves to be the very best or cope if we never take ourselves too seriously at all. Like them, I am forced to leave out details in polite company or in front of people who would break to hear them. Like them, I could bind my brain in propulsive gumption and fun, focus on the tasks at hand to inch closer to a future, and close my heart to memories lest anyone blame me for being stuck in the past.
But if I were to tell my story the way my grandmothers told me theirs, with curious eyes staring up at the near-comfortable end to a sprawling, circumstantial, nonlinear narrative, would I feel the need to instruct or to entertain? Would I draw a straight line through the muck from A to B to prove a point or hit the highlights like a vivacious pinball machine? Would that decision, if it is a decision at all, be up to me or the listener? If I love them, how would I want them to walk through the world after?
The mirrors I’ve held up to the women who made my family and myself are as much reverential as self-referential. When I think of them, I know I’m thinking of the parts of them I want to see in me: vibrance, power, and indisputable badassery.
I fear, though: in continuing to hide the stories women never intend to bring to light behind the angles we wish to approach them from, have we done our storytellers a favor or a disservice? Will there be a time when we will wish the struggles that they are born with and are borne out in between their legs weren’t reality? Will we ignore them so we don’t have to find anyone to blame? Or will we seek justice even if we know we cannot find it?
Ultimately, the gifts my grandmothers have given me, my cousins, and my parents in telling and not telling us their stories can only be ascribed, I imagine, to a combination of genes, calculated reasoning, and boundless, effusive love. The gaps in their tales will loom largely at me from behind veils of foggy memories, painful decisions, Indian etiquette, and patriarchy, and I will desperately try to fill them in with history, speculation, and my own experiences.
Yet these will all be, simply, the pieces that everyone hopes will explain who they were while we forget most crucially that people are more than the sum of their stories. Because my grandmothers - like too many hidden, silent women- are stronger and more magical than we or they will ever know. Try as I might to find the same magic in myself, one can never honestly tell the same stories exactly the same way twice. I can only close my eyes and hope that love, regret, and nostalgia do not distract me from their voices.
And I listen.
