Ammaji

My grandmother died when I was in a different city. My father returned to Calcutta. I went on with my usual days. If I sit now and inquire, I may just invest those moments with some feeling. But the truth is, she was unwell for a long time. When Ammaji died, it was the slow inevitable motion of an old house. Rivers change course and dry up. I found nothing to trouble myself over.

She lived in an old house. Its yellow outside walls bear the stains of the main road in front. At the corner, is a crowded Gurudwara. The footpath outside is covered in bundled figures at night. Nowadays many come in cars to eat in the dhaba opposite. The house was built in the 1930s, when my great-grandfather came to Calcutta from Dhaka. He was a judge. His son was a judge. Their photos hang inside, indifferent to the ugliness of life. My grandfather’s father looks very stern. He arranged his son’s marriage with the daughter of a brother judge. This daughter was to become my grandmother. It hardly matters, this history. We are too caught up in our lives to feel the flow of decades. Except, occasionally, when a fading wall lit by a river evening brings it to us.

The house has a wide terrace, on which if you stand in the evenings, the river wind may just reach you through the fumes of the vehicles. My sister and I used to run about, ducking to avoid the clothes hanging to dry. Ammaji would hobble after us, prayer thali in hand, a gentle reprimand in her eyes. Towards the end, she just lay in bed inside. My parents sleep their now, when we stay in that house. I am given my father’s old room, much to his resentment.

In the afternoons, from the desk in my father’s old room, you can look out the corridor window at tiny flags on equally old ledges of nearby homes. Red meaningless flags. The window is mostly coated in dust. Behind the house is a field, the grass now overgrown, where men sit on winter afternoons and play cards. During the monsoons of my childhood, I would watch boys play football there. I was never allowed to join them. I would love their game from the window of Ammaji’s room, her dozing off to the afternoons. Sometimes when the sun shines on it, I can suddenly see the field as it was. And the terrace returns, for the briefest moment, to its older joy.

Ammaji died many years back. I didn’t feel much. The tinted windows by the staircase are still broken. The pillars by the corridor downstairs, where we played cricket, are silent and discolored. Some motions still continue, for those alive by the force of habit.

My grandmother was never very important. She would visit us for some time in dusty Delhi. By the time we went to Bangalore she was too old to enjoy the visits. She soon stopped travelling. My sister and I went through our regular dilemmas and grew older. Ammaji, with her values and methods, was an anachronism. A slightly flawed ideal, to be mocked at lightly. Unreal and small. Occasionally, we’d feel a kind of affection. My sister wrote about her once. She thought of writing a book on Ammaji.

I couldn’t have bothered less. Ammaji was there when I was born. And like many others she left. I often wondered whether I should have felt a minimum sadness. Whether I should have missed her a little. But you cant force yourself to feel.

So it was with mild surprise that this winter, while walking on Ammaji’s old terrace, for the briefest moment, I smelt her. A mixture of her talcum powder and prayer flowers, her washed hair and crumpled white sari. I walked to the railing and looked down at the big cars whizzing by, destroying the city forever. I turned back to the clothesline and the house behind and could imagine Ammaji there, hobbling towards me, prayer thali in hand. I could hear her gentle reprimand.

It is true that we learn and realize most through ruptures and cataclysms. But sometimes, a regular evening may bring about a sublime shift. That the world is ugly, that men are vile, these things may be brought to us through chance ruptures. But that we have, within us, hidden reserves of sorrow is revealed softly, to the old terraces of our childhoods, river winds washing over. Without noise or ceremony, on a regular winter afternoon, the sun slowly setting to gray, we may feel a slight sense of loss.