Once Removed
My grandmother is dead, which is too bad, because she'd be really chuffed to know that I'm writing about her again. She was vain that way, it goes without saying. I hope she's watching from somewhere, from heaven or through the eyes of her reincarnated self, and puffing up with pride.
The real problem with her being dead, though, isn't just the fact that she can't read this (or hear people talk about reading this—that would be even better). The problem is the gaping hole she's left in India.
How can a country of a billion people be so empty without one person? When I go to the India without my grandmother in it it's like I'm in some awful parallel universe of powercuts and bucket baths, 100 percent humidity and three freshly cooked meals a day, but it's all wrong somehow.
I suppose some of the changes are improvements. There's a BMW showroom in Chennai. We can eat in a restaurant without fear of certain diarrheal death. But this is not the India I know, the place where my parents took me every other summer of my childhood. Big houses filled with cargo loads of cousins playing endless games of kabbadi and carroms. The physical pain of separation from Saturday morning cartoons and Sunday night pizza. Feedings and scoldings, doled out in equal measure and with equal severity, by my grandmother.
The cousins have now, shall we say, diasporized. Malaysia, U.S., U.K. Aunts and uncles close up the big houses for six months of the year, visiting well-settled children, helping with grandchildren. But until recently my grandmother was always there. A trip to India was a trip to see her, to spend time in the curious corners of her house crammed with bank papers and clocks, to hear the particular clatter and hiss of her kitchen. Her comically heavy footsteps paired with the teasing whisper of her sari. Scoldings now delivered primarily to the neighbor's children, although I am not always spared. Her slow, nasal breathing as she wills her gnarled fingers to button her sari blouse. And in later days the frustration in her voice as she calls for help to get dressed.
When my daughter was six months old we brought her to India to see my grandmother. But they never met. My grandmother died two days before we arrived.
Now my daughter is almost four. She has been to India three times in her short life, but it is the India without my grandmother in it. I cannot figure out what that India is so how can I explain it to her?
Her India is a place of once-grand houses filled with once-grand people, cobwebs and cable TV. Instead of reading stacks of Amar Chitra Katha comics, waiting, waiting for cousins to come home from school, she wades through 158 channels of satellite cable, waiting, waiting for Dora the Explorer to come on. Her India is sweet. She gets to put sugar in everything, even the milk. Her paternal grandparents give her chocolate and let her watch TV day and night. Her India is the opposite of mine, a pampered loneliness.
"Why there's only grandparents here?" she asks. Does she notice the hole, too? That nagging feeling of who are these people? What am I doing here? I sit round the table with my husband's family, like mine on the face of things, speaking the same language, wearing the same clothes, but so different, so deep down different.
I try to be an honest parent to my kids—there are two now, my almost-four-year-old girl and a baby boy who can't ask any questions yet. (His primary concern is inserting Cheerios into his mouth. You get Cheerios in India now.) I told myself I would never force something on my kids if I didn't believe in it myself, just because it's good for them or because I'm trying to give them something that I didn't have, or couldn't have, or gave up.
Maybe they will find their own India. Maybe it is the place where you put sugar in everything and watch Dora TV all day while eating chocolate. At least they like it there. I just hope they figure it out on their own, before they notice the big phony across the table, the one smiling like she belongs here.
