There is but one thread that connects me to my maternal grandmother who passed away on a confusing, no-time-to-brood day at the peak of the second Covid wave in India in 2021. We do not know what really killed her – pneumonia induced by severe downfall in Hemoglobin levels or possible-Covid – but death descended on her amidst a flurry of strenuous running-around to get her medical care. Around 2am that night, the family having decided to let her pass away instead of putting her through a protracted misery of sickness and treatments to lymphocitic leukamia, my mom woke me up to let me know that aji, on whom I had affixed the oxygen mask from the concentrator just a few hours ago, had passed away. She lay motionless, somewhat awkwardly, with her right arm across her neck, her bony elbow propping up, one of her legs bent, on the steel cot that my brother and I had assembled with some help from my father… the same cot on which I had lied next to her, watching old Tamil movie clips, or pattimandram speeches with her, not knowing when it was her turn to leave us all.
I’ve always nurtured this idea that aji was more fond of my other two cousins than I. That they got to spend almost all of their growing-up years with aji around them, almost being a second-mom to my brother and often being the first-mom to my sister, helped cement this notion in me. I’d only get to interact with her during the summer holidays when my mom would take me to the grandparents’ place, or when the gramps visited us. And in those days, there was a side of aji that remained, in my knowledge, completely hidden. It took my brother’s coming-of-age (and his prodding) for her to reveal that she had an outrageously smart, witty side to her and once that happened, there was no stopping her, even during the times she was in the ICU, fresh out of a near-death experience when the first sign of leukamia started rearing its head.
Sometime by then, we were all grown-ups and there was no causticity to the feeling of being the grandson she had spent the least amount of time with. As dire the situation was – she had to come stay with us because, at the time, only mom had the time to take care of her – the silver-lining to it (for me, personally) was that now this merchant-of-unexpected-wit would be living with us. Living with me. Just a handful of years before this was when I found in aji the perfect person I could talk excitedly about old Tamil songs, their nuances, their composers, their tales and more (besides my school friends R and S). It didn’t strike me then as to why it was such a glorious moment but retrospectively, it’s because I could finally, finally connect with aji in a way that was exclusively mine. While aji was a great aficionado of the songs themselves for the lyrics (and the lyricists), I went after the music and the arrangement and the history. She’d often quip, in response to me asking and then telling her that such-and-such song was composed by such-and-such person (usually MSV), that back in her day, she hardly paid any attention to who the composer was and all they cared about was the actors onscreen and the people who penned the lyrics. I felt proud (vain, I know) that I knew more about a song that came out when aji was in her prime than aji did.
I eventually discovered great acting (and greater dialog) in comedy scenes of old Tamil movies and, soon enough, these became a topic of conversation as well. Aji had a bad back that prevented her from sitting for more than a few minutes so she had to often lie down. You could try a lot of things to keep her entertained but there’s only so much that could be done with the vagaries of a daily life lived as a middle-class, salaried household. Everyone of us tried ways to help her while away the time as she lay on her steel cot. Mine was to lie next to her, open up YouTube on my phone, clip in the earphones – one in my ear and the other in hers – and watch, with her, a Nagesh-Balaiah scene, or a Chandrababu one, or a Cho-Nagesh one (the options were endless, really). I’d often pretend that I was doing it because I was bored and that I just wanted to lie down and watch something and only plugged in and shared the earphone for courtesy but now that I think of it, I wonder if she was clued in to the pretense all along.
For many months after her passing, I avoided anything black-and-white like the plague – no old Tamil songs, no old Tamil movie clips, and sometimes not even anything that goes back to the 60s and 70s of the Tamil silverscreen era. But it had to give eventually and so I weaved my way back through contemporary artists talking about those days, few stray clips thrown in for emphasis and exemplification. At long last, I could watch everything again but always ending with the absolutely crushing emptiness of not having aji to talk, discuss, or share with.
I was never as close to my aji as my other cousins were, in all my life. But that one thread was plentiful enough to quench an inexplicable want to connect with her.