Memories Will Live Through Photos of Photos Feb 24/Apr 21
Two years ago, before I was set to leave the country, my dad took me on a trip— a pilgrimage of sorts— back to his village. I hadn’t been there in years. Between the power cuts and subsequent scarcity of internet, and inherent avoidance of family obligations, none of my family’s frequent journeys back to the farm spurred any desire in me to join them. So for years, I had successfully avoided having to do that, enjoying instead a weekend alone at home. But there was no way I could move countries before receiving the manedevaru’s blessing first-hand. A six-hour-long train, followed by two more hours in a car, journeying through the heartland of Malenadu, finally brought me back to Nedaravalli. Its distinct kaccha mud roads, archetypal to any Indian village, had not changed one bit in years, though I could see that there were many more streetlights. Wobbling through, in between farmland, tile-roofed houses and empty cowsheds, we finally reached home. The unmistakable sound of the Maruthi 800 brought Ajji to attention, surpassing past her gradually declining hearing, as I could see her walking to receive us. “Baby, bandhya?”
Since my dad’s father’s death a decade ago, Ajji has been living alone in our recently renovated house in Nedaravalli, which now has an extra floor from when she first came into it. Her bad knee confines her to the ground floor, leaving the top to be inhabited solely by old trophies and my grandfather’s vast collection of books, ranging from great masterpieces of Russian literature to guidebooks on socialism and computer programming. Otherwise, us occasional visitors passed by to make use of the floor, balcony, beds, and bathroom upstairs.
The obligatory prayers and offerings were completed immediately. Then, we sat down to eat dinner around the old wooden dining table that has traveled, in its years of this family’s ownership, across every corner of Karnataka as the family itself followed my grandfather from place to place with each new job. For the two decades of my life that I have known my family, I’ve heard from my dad numerous stories of his father and the many feats of professional greatness he reached during his life. The first engineer in not only our family but the entirety of our village and its neighboring villages; a great inspiration to my father, who followed in his footsteps with hopes for his son to do the same. This family has always been the engineer’s family; so us, the engineer’s grandchildren, my dad, the engineer’s son, and my grandmother, the wife of the engineer.
I was told that this was Ajji’s birthday, which also happened to be on of my monthly celebrations before my first birthday
While Appa, Ajji, and I ate dinner that night, I answered a list of questions (What will I cook for myself in Amsterdam? Do I know how to make sambhar? Is my university good?) and received a collection of advice (I should sprout beans on the regular. Too much Western food is bad for you. If I limit myself to making rasam rice, I will not be getting enough protein.). My dad made inquiries of her health. We finished the meal off with mosaranna, good for digestion. Finally, when we were done, “go help Ajji,” my dad said. I went to the kitchen and began washing dishes when she walked in and stopped me from doing it. I insisted to finish, she insisted I stop— a typical battle in the intervisiting of Indian households; I cannot remember who won that night. All three of us went to bed after, my dad and I upstairs, and she to her single bed in her ground-floor room.
The next morning, I only woke up after breakfast was ready. After breakfast, my dad had to leave to go do whatever dads do when back home in their villages, and I was to stay home and keep Ajji company. I had not, at that point, kept Ajji company for about a decade owing to the other typical Indian formality of intrafamily conflict. I wondered if we had anything at all to talk about, as she had exhausted the entire checklist of questions and advice over dinner last night. “We are family after all, we will think of something to talk about,” I thought to myself. If it were to truly be so dreadful, I had my grandfather’s books and the isolatory upper floor to resort to.
Through these albums, we traversed from my grandfather’s BE graduation to my parents' wedding, my birth, and finally my brother’s ceremonial baldening. Astonished (needlessly) by our collective uncanny resemblance, I had for the first time really looked into my family’s history. I also got to see, for the first time, my grandmother with thick, long, black hair worn as two braids with a fringe poking out in the front, as opposed to the thin, greying single braid that I had been used to seeing all my life. This was Girijamma, not Ajji.
Photos taken by my kid father
Ajji, sitting third from the left in the front row,
recognizable as the only girl wearing two braids
We spent an hour flipping through the albums, and I took many photos of these photos on my phone. I felt I had no right to keep any of them, nor could I possibly take them away from where they have been housed for all these years. As every trophy of my father that belongs under that roof, this too belongs there, I thought. Thank god for our portable devices and mechanical reproducibility. For now, while I waited to inherit these albums, a photo of a photo would do. Closing on our hour, we heard the Maruthi 800 pull in and closed the albums to go greet my dad. His return was also a sign that it was lunch time, and my grandmother was nothing if not punctual in providing the day's meals. She worked mechanically, sitting at her analog tools, grinding coconut by hand and cutting vegetables with a katthi. This time, I offered myself to help if she wanted help with anything, and she, once again, refused my offer. I didn’t resist much this time and just sat down in the kitchen, observing her.
As she was cutting her vegetables— beans, if I remember correctly— she started talking about herself, a change from her usual tales of my childhood or my dad’s. She got married to my granddad as a teenager and left her ancestral village to move to Nedaravalli, and subsequently wherever else he was posted to. My granddad, in his mid 20s, had just received his revered engineering degree and had set out to work for a steel factory in a supervisorial capacity. Ajji spent the first several months of their marriage alone in Nedaravalli, with sporadic visitors to keep her company. She was surrounded by her family, old and new, and began to learn the ways of being a lady. Soon enough, she moved to the city with her husband and had to put into practice her training as a good wife.
She got married at fourteen and studied in Sagara for a year. After the brief stint in Nedaravalli, in 1965, she moved to Bhadravati, to my granddad’s new house, and did not yet know how cook. She learned to cook from her neighbors— women she doesn’t know anymore. She cooks without masala because its use varied in everybody’s recipe. At fifteen, she did not know how much water went into upittu, and it made her cry. A few years from the wedding, my father is born to her and from that moment on, she has been a mother and commited earnestly to this responsibility. Having been her own caretaker since she was a teenager, she only eats food that she makes and does not like asking for help. She must return from her trips by daybreak and always sleep in her own bed.
This was a fascinating tale of the person behind her matronly duty that I had accessed, so unexpectedly and after so long of knowing her. Here was a girl who was thrust with the responsibility of a whole other person’s wellbeing and soon after, two more people whom she raised from when she was younger than I have been for years. She continued saying that she never can ask for help because she has spent her whole life doing everything she has to on her own. It not only doesn’t become her to divide her labor but she simply has never been used to, or had the desire to do expedite her work. Her deterrence of my washing dishes made sense to me now, but I couldn’t shake the reality of her life spent in the performance of labor, especially since I now had a tangible image of a little girl in two braids being housemaker.
When I was 11 and we still lived in the same home, I hadn’t yet developed the power to sleep on my own. The notorious possibilities of darkness and isolation scared me beyond rational explanation. I required the company of adults until I was sure to have fallen into sleep. Even my brother’s presence in the bottom bunk I had fought my way out of being stuck with brought no reassurance of calm. This boy would fall asleep in the seconds of the lights being turned off and wouldn’t awake until he was late for school the next morning. So, a designated adult in our then-joint family had to stand and tell me tales until drowsiness trapped me. One night when Ajji was on this dreadful duty, she put her foot down and thought to encourage me out of this cowardly way of being.
The telling of this tale coincided with my mother and I happening to visit a Durga temple in Kolkata during Pujo where my mother got me a thin, steel kada, and told me that I had the goddess’ protection shielding me day and night— evidently everyone had had it with my proloning gutlessness. Thankfully then, upon my return home, with inspiration and divine fortification, I finally gathered the courage to sleep at night.
Recounting this while I wrote, I thought again of the young girl in two braids. In this very Nedaravalli house, back when it only had one floor, and progressively the sole house in the village without an outhouse bathroom, all this had happened. As a kid, it scandalized me that she was only a teenager when she got married; how old, she hadn’t said. That’s child marriage, I thought to myself in shock. Now the specificities of this child marriage are known to me and it only feels worse to know, thinking of what could have been of her life: possibly nothing very different. Given this destiny of hers, she has done quite well for herself. She embedded in herself not the trait of submissiveness but of resilience. Never once, in any conversation or context, has she backed down, not with bigger matters like property or smaller like letting me wash her plate.