Losing Ammachi
As written on the 20th of April 2017: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156096593489447&set=pob.676734446&type=3&theater
We lost our Ammachi this Tuesday. She was almost 90 years old.
Ammachi’s passing away is beginning to feel like a complex experience for me. As I sat at the funeral, I thought about several things; including how markedly different we are when responding to the deaths of strong women; how the loss of a person, regardless of their age, could be so finishing, so stopping; and how some of us, who’ve seen death a few times already, cope with loss, over and over again. Unlike my South Asian/Indian contemporaries, and the likes of Adichie, I cannot fashionably claim that my grandmother was a feminist in ‘her own way’. She wasn’t even close to being one.
The best I can come up with, by virtue of my complicated relationship with her, is that she was a strong-willed woman who got shit done. She spent most of her adult life as a school teacher and an aayer-amma (pastor’s wife). In addition to leading women’s fellowships and vacation bible schools in CSI churches across North Tamil Nadu, she was a mother of five children. Amma says she even spoke on the radio once.
Amma reminisces Ammachi to be a very good looking woman; but I have poor memories of her long dark hair and light skin. What I do remember are her green fingers in the garden and magic spices in the kitchen. Ammachi’s house had firecracker flowers (Kanakambaram), a drumstick tree that never ran out of produce, an overpowering mango tree, shrubs whose names I still don’t know, and jackfruits. Coconuts were dried and pressed to give out a smelly, yellow oil, which of course I had to wear on my non-existent hair back then. Raw mangoes were soaked in water with chili powder, salt, and turmeric, which I would steal and gulp during lazy afternoons. Biryanis were always home-made and evening teas were always sweet. Ammachi defined my grandchild-life thus.
In retrospect, I imagine how life must have been for her. Born in the late 1920s, she lived through World War II, the Quit India movement, the Indian independence and partition, mass conversions of Dalits into Buddhism and Christianity, riots, drought, and the façade of modernism. I imagine her as a young wife and a mother, who may have sought to carve her own space within an already marginalized community. What were her dreams then? Did she aspire to be a ‘career-woman’ like some of my contemporaries do? Did she want to be a mother of only a hundred sons, and no daughters? Did she like to read and run? Did she enjoy teaching, or was it just another way to send her children to school? How did she come to become a woman with a demeanor so unshakeable?
Ammachi, despite her lack of obvious warmth, was the anchor of the blue house, which now would never be the same again. Her authoritative voice would never be heard again — not at church or at home. Her potato fry, with a careless hint of tomato, will only exist in the form of our mediocre replicas. And the same goes for her indomitable spirit.
I’m careful though; I don’t want to exotify her persona or poeticize my experiences with her. She was who she was. A strong-willed woman who got shit done. A matriarch of sorts, if you will. Loving her was not easy, but as my sister puts it, losing her does feel like the end of an era. RIP Ammachi.
Photo: Yes, I looked like a lanky boy 17 years ago.
