Devaki: 1919 (1920?) – 2019
I
The night before my great-grandmother died alone in her tharavad in Paumba, my mother told me about how possessed crows fly towards heaven. We almost never discuss the supernatural, so when news of Big Amooma’s death reached Mumbai the following afternoon, it left a strong impression. I’m not saying that Big Amooma was waiting for a good cue to die. But I suspect it would be just as arrogant to say that the way these two events happened, one after the other, was nothing of significance. I was there. It felt significant.
The night in question, my sister and I sat around the dining table and discussed death, divorce and illness with our parents, for whom any difference between the three was a technicality. The discussion turned complex. Names of relatives, places, and things were skilfully shuffled and dealt out in Malayalam. At one point I left the table and returned with a paper and pen to take notes. This was slightly out of a paranoia for missing details¹, but mostly out of the guilt at never having cared for details when I was younger and a non-resident of India.
I think the paper and pen were proof to my parents I wasn’t being polite with all my questions. They stopped sparing details after that. My father explained beli, a traditional mourning rite through which nair caste families in Kerala nourished released souls, and patiently egged them towards salvation. First, you had to tie a ring of dry grass to your finger, and pour water over a black stone to clean it. There were many ingredients you then had to place on the stone: raw rice, black sesame, sandalwood powder, ash powder. He recited these to me like a grocery list. You put every ingredient on the cleaned stone three times, and at the end you rolled them all into a ball of cooked rice. By this time, the crows would be lined along the temple walls. One among them would be possessed by the dead person’s soul.
My parents were unable to clarify whether this was a hostile possession or one of mutual benefit. Did a soul find a crow who had always wanted to visit heaven, and was glad for the company? Regardless, the function of the rice was to energise the possessed crow for the long flight ahead.
Once, my mother told us, she attended someone’s funeral and his eldest son showed up late for the beli. The entire murder of crows kept perch on the temple walls, and their arms, though they had none, were crossed. People tried clapping to encourage the crows to eat; then, they tried backing away from the beli. Nothing worked. The rice balls went untouched until the son arrived. I felt keenly for him. How awful to see those crows simmer with judgement, and know your father was as unimpressed with you in death and he had been in life. My mother thought the incident was miraculous – she had never seen a Kerala crow wait for anything if it was hungry, least of all the right moment. She turned to me and said, I’m not lying, this happened. And I felt her request to be believed keenly too, because my atheism has always been a tension between us. My father is religious but financially minded, and I think he categorised my beliefs as a sunk cost early on. My mother never quite made peace the same way. The first time she ever confronted me was the first time I ever said I don’t believe in God aloud. It was surprising and painful for both of us. I couldn’t shake the sense that if I were to now redirect my life’s efforts towards proving she had brought me up right, I would be playing with a tremendous handicap.
I believed her though. I believed that crows, under extraordinary circumstances, would wait.
The next day, when my mother picked up the phone and heard that the nurse had found Big Amooma stiff in her cot, she hung up and dialled my grandmother who was at the hospital for a knee treatment. Amma, amooma marichu, ta?, which meant mom, grandmom died, okay? She then stuck her head out of the room, adding as an afterthought: Shreya, Big Amooma died, okay? I was at the table, and reacted in some trite way: either Oh fuck!, or Shit, really?, feigning surprise though I’d heard her conversation through the open door. My mother began phoning relatives in Kerala one by one, always ending the news of Big Amooma’s death with her reflexive ta?, as if the matter had to be understood by consensus. I remained at the table, one chair to the right of where I had been sitting the previous night. Two days later, we left for Agra to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday.
II
If all the accounts I’d been hearing since childhood were correct, Big Amooma had been nearly a hundred years old for two decades now. My grandmother thought Big Amooma had died at one hundred, pushing one hundred and one. To me, her opinion seemed to come more from the abundant generosity we find for someone’s achievements in the aftermath of their death than any authority over her mother’s life. My mother thought Big Amooma had died at ninety-nine. She isn’t at all afraid of voicing unpopular opinions.
I remember later that same afternoon, awkwardly hovering by my mother’s elbow as she ironed and reminisced about Big Amooma. I asked her how she felt. She was fine, but felt badly about the knowledge Big Amooma had taken with her to heaven. I imagined all of Big Amooma’s knowledge packed into a tiny suitcase, hanging from a crow’s leg and shaking in the high winds.
In the memoir Ants Among Elephants – a controversial² history of her untouchable family – Sujatha Gidla writes:
Nancharayya, David John, Rani, Graceamma, Manikya Rao, Lilly Flora, Carey—they all died before I had a chance to finish talking to them. Every time my mother would tell me the latest news, I was inconsolable.
My mother thinks I’ve developed an attachment to the people I am writing about. She thinks I am grieving their loss. But what I am really grieving is the material that is lost forever.
When these deaths come, they traumatize me. I cannot speak or eat or sleep. I cannot stand or sit up. When Nallamma, a peripheral figure in the story, died soon after I spoke to her, it nearly killed me. No one could understand. When friends, not knowing how I felt, tried to coax me out of bed, I turned violent.
My mother didn’t feel nearly so crazed as Gidla – there exists, for obvious reasons, rich and plentiful documentation of my upper-caste nair family’s ancestry.³ Her lament was very matter-of-fact. All that knowledge, she repeated as she speared the iron across the clothes, gone. Then, out of nowhere, except perhaps a desire to make sure I wasn’t being misled, she said: Big Amooma was very pig-headed, you know.
Some of what she narrated that afternoon were stories I had internalised young and simplistically, without the capacity or interest I now have to prod for details. In the 1950s, Big Amooma gave birth to her fifth child, a birth for which her philandering husband was entirely absent. She told him to get his act together. It emerged he wouldn’t; she shaved her head in protest and moved out. People believe that Kerala, having once been a matrilineal society, subjects its women to less indignities than most places in India. Kerala remains unbothered by these expectations.⁴ What Big Amooma did is only marginally less unthinkable today than it was back then. Money was soon tight, living was hell: she had married off all three of her daughters by the time they turned eighteen. Big Amooma’s father gave her some land with which to survive, and she hired lower-caste workers – chovans – to help her cut paddy. They were given wages and food and strict instructions to never step foot in the house. My mother spent her summer vacations on that estate, and would play with the chovan children during the day. This made Big Amooma angry, even though the land reform movement that continued through the 1970s should’ve given more cause for concern. The chovans, along with the pulayans and the parayars, left the upper-caste tharavads to tend to their land, land that was finally wholly owned by them. By the 1980s and the Gulf boom, many had migrated to Middle-Eastern countries for higher-paying work.
Towards the end of her life, Big Amooma’s casteism still ran deep, but she inconvenienced herself with it more than anyone else. One lower-caste nurse quit her job in frustration after Big Amooma’s persistent accusations that she was bringing men over to the tharavad at night. The fear of someone having sex under her roof was one of Big Amooma’s greatest fixations, and no one could rid her of it. I can picture her tharavad in Paumba, surrounded by the impenetrable greenery of those mango, jackfruit, cashew and arecanut trees – a dark and looming house, long and low-roofed, resonantly empty. It didn’t promise privacy as much as it promised a haunting. I’d go there to have a psychosexual breakdown, but the idea of anyone enjoying physical intimacy within those walls seemed far-fetched.
Big Amooma eventually found a nurse who stuck around. Complaints about this nurse were subdued, because she made fabulous meen curry. It fast became the established practice for pacifying Big Amooma: go out, buy fish, cook meen curry.
She never stopped being stubborn, my mother said. It got her through tough years, but…The iron rested thoughtfully for a moment, and then my mother shrugged, abandoning the effort to explain the tensions of Big Amooma’s personality in one sentence.
Big Amooma went senile in her final days, living on a diet of milk and bananas. She seemed to believe she was in a bygone ration era, and demanded milk packets from various residents of Paumba in exchange for one rupee. They gave her the milk. I think she must have been energetically pitied.
III
In Malayalam, amma means mother. Muthassi means grandmother, but I’ve heard amooma used more. And the word for great-grandmother is muttumuthassi. It’s a grand one; a word made from the authoritarian clicks of wooden methiyadi slippers approaching from a distance. You say it out loud and your spine self-corrects into obedience. I’d always thought my parents had shoved this crutch of ‘Big Amooma’ under the armpits of their anglicised daughters, because getting our mouths to pronounce muttumuthassi was a lost cause. Years later, my sister and I were informed we arrived at ‘Big Amooma’ on our own.
The afternoon I learnt Big Amooma died, I asked my mother what her name had been. I hadn’t asked in all my twenty-one years. Here Big Amooma was, dead, and I did not have the language to define her independent of relation to me. My mother said her name was Devaki kunyamma, so I searched the Internet for what Devaki meant.
Googling the meaning of names is a habit I’ve recently developed. I used to hate the meaning of my own name, ‘auspicious’. Is there a word more religiously implicated than ‘auspicious’? My mother wanted to call me ‘Amal’, after the severe and beautiful Iranian OB-GYN who helped give birth to me. She settled on ‘Shreya’ at the behest of my grandmother, who first used her veto powers to blacklist ‘Vaidehi’. Vaidehi is another name for Sita. The logic goes that you suffer the fate of whoever you are named for. It seemed reasonable to scrutinise Sita’s fate and conclude you didn’t want your grandchild swallowed by the Earth. But picking Shreya over Amal made no sense. Amal is such an obviously superior name. I was resentful for a long time.
When I finally voiced these resentments to my mother, she unfolded her reading spectacles and got to work, typing with great labour on her phone – a mother’s job of polishing the delicate Fabergé egg of her child’s self-esteem, even well into their adulthood, is never over. After a minute or so she held up the screen: See here! Persian roots! Your name also means ‘lattice’.
It was a better outcome than anything I could have imagined. Persian roots! Lattice! How authentic, how full of history! I felt like I’d been I’d been lent a delusion of personal culture, without any of the alienation that comes from the effort of seeking one. For a moment I was free to forget the atrophied muscle in my personhood, the one that twitched in shame when I couldn’t laugh as hard at Malayalam comedies as my parents. I wanted to fold Auspicious Shreya as a banana leaf after sadhya, fold her in fourths and put her away. I wanted to hear her midrib crack.
The weekend we went to Agra for my mother’s fiftieth birthday, I ran my hands over the white marble lattice work at Salim Chishti’s dargah. It was cool to the touch, except in the places it wasn’t: where hands before mine had tried searching-and-frisking the marble.
I searched the Internet for what Devaki meant, thinking please, please let Big Amooma mean something more than great-grandmother of Shreya. I learned that Devaki means ‘mother of Krishna’. Clearly there were forces colluding to define Big Amooma through dependency. She couldn’t catch a break. Then I thought of the original Devaki, who jumped into her husband’s funeral pyre along with three of his wives. Big Amooma outlived her useless husband by twenty-five years.
IV
Before she moved back to her lonely tharavad for good, Big Amooma lived with my grand-uncle for a while. Their house was five minutes away by motorbike from my grandparents’. I remember a huge iron-wrought gate we had to open by sticking an arm through the gap in the bars and turning the latch. An empty dog kennel stood on the right as the gate swung open. Well, I was told it was a dog kennel – given the absence of any canine for miles, I suspected it was jail for people of my height.
Big Amooma would always be waiting at the front door. She would have one hand on the door frame and one foot on the threshold, her gummy mouth slightly open, like we had spontaneously materialised.
She was so small. Her skin looked like baked walnut. Her eye sockets had the depth of teacups, and her eyes seemed filmed over with milk dregs. I remember Big Amooma, barely any taller than me, taking out footstools to reach for sweets on high shelves when I was hungry. I see her now, pouring my favourite spicy mixture into a bowl, or turning the volume dial by hand when I couldn’t hear the television.
The kitchen door led outside the house, into a small patch of shade. Big Amooma would sit there, cross-legged on a mat, with a plate full of fish. There’d be ten or twelve fish on this single plate, arranged close and delicate as petals. She’d be skinning or gutting or chopping them, enacting all manners of violence. Her blouse would flop about her bony sagging chest, getting damp with sweat. I felt if I passed her a glass of water she might pour it over her head, like any bricklayer working in the heat. But she also had the focused immersion of a paramedic at a crash site, who works knowing there are lives on the line. And maybe there were. I’ve never seen Malayalis eat fish without a ferocious sense of their own mortality.
But I never saw Big Amooma eat the meen curry she so loved. I never saw her laugh or shout, argue or crack a joke. I never saw her say something in a moment of weakness, and quietly take it back later. I never knew her likes and dislikes. For a long time, it was incomprehensible that she might have any; that she might actually be a fully formed person. And here’s the kicker: I didn’t care. It is easy to love and be loved by someone when you only see each other once every few years. This is why the love I share with my parents is complicated, the love I share with my grandparents is uncomplicated, and the love I shared with Big Amooma was the easiest of them all. She indulged me in everything, and I loved her for it.
However, if we take what Tim Kreider says to be true – that to reap “the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known”⁵ – it follows I never loved Big Amooma, because I didn’t know her. This is alarming to consider, but worth considering. As the years went by, I grew high-minded, felt sorry for her. When I did something kind, like her take her hands in mine when it was time to say good-bye – press what I thought was love, into her palms like loose change – I felt good about myself. I liked seeing her gummy mouth stretch into a smile. I liked driving away as she sat on the porch of her tharavad, watching her shrink through the car window, thinking that my twenty-minute visit had made her day.
V
Big Amooma is dead, and I will never know her fully, but you never know anyone fully. That doesn’t absolve you from the attempt of trying. There is now much to do. There are people to talk to, and hours upon hours of notes left to take – my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother’s estranged siblings, three nurses, the residents of Paumba, and perhaps a few crows.
A Kochi crow. Source: Fabio Campo, Flickr.
Notes:
At the time, I had just finished reading Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir
See Chinnaiah Jangam’s criticism in The Wire.
My father recently bought this coffee table book on Amazon. A photographic history of the Guruvayoor Temple, it talks about the various families historically designated as caretakers of the temple, including ours. Though published in 2013, my extended family WhatsApp group still can’t get enough.
Kerala was never really a matriarchy. Its women have the highest unemployment rate in the country, despite having the greatest educational attainment; in 2016, just 8 women were elected to the state assembly. The cracks in the ‘model state for women’ narrative are showing, especially since the Sabarimala demonstrations.
A newfound favourite: Tim Kreider’s I Know What You Think of Me
With thanks to Chan, Gautam, Sneha and Sourya for their valuable advice, and especially Saumya, who sat patiently and lovingly through all the iterations.