The woman who influenced me most lives in me. In my thoughts and attitudes, and in my name: ‘Shankari’ from Sankari ammal, my paternal grandmother. That’s the custom in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, from where both my parents come — first-born boy and girl would take paternal grandparents name, and the second-born, the maternal grandparent’s name. Everyone says I remind them of her, especially when I stick stubbornly with what I think is right. ‘Just like her Paatti’. Whether anybody means it as a compliment, I do take it as one.

I grew up in Allahabad and later, in Delhi. My parents would take us every summer to Madurai to visit my grandma, where she stayed with her other sons. Every night, all the children, I and my cousins, would sit in a circle on the terrace and wait for ‘nilaachoru’ or ‘dinner in the moonlight’. She would mix rice and buttermilk in a bowl, season it with mustard and green chillies, make fist-sized balls and put it in our extended hands. And then tell us stories. We would be asked to cut a trench in the rice ball in our hands with our thumbs, into which will be spooned left-over vegetables, sambar or whatever. Ah, you wouldn’t believe the enormous appetite that would descend on us — we would eat and eat, and the stories would continue till the last morsel of food in the bowl.

As small kids, our granny had a none-too-big stock of stories, which she would repeat. But as we grew older, we protested that we wouldn’t eat till she told us new stories. Thus we graduated from animal tales of crows, ants, foxes, lions, rabbits and crocodiles to folklores of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law to anecdotes from Mahabharata, Ramyana and other Puranas.

My granny taught us many shlokas, some of which had to be merely recited, and some had to be sung. She was a good singer, though she hadn’t been trained. Neither was she educated beyond third standard, but she had immense interest in learning. She would listen to the radio news broadcast without fail, and would also read Tamil newspapers like Swadesamitran, one of the earliest dailies, and Dinamalar and magazines like Ananda Vikatan.

Patti had been fond of cinema too, an avocation that made her the butt of much criticism. It gave me ample occasions to tease her, but she defended it saying she watched mostly devotional movies. But what about ‘social’ movies, and what about all the love stories, we’d go on. But she countered that it taught her a lot about the world. Indeed, her awareness of the world beyond the four walls of her house was really commendable, and to which I am indebted to, for it made a world of difference to all of us.

My grandmother lost her husband at a very young age of 33, by which time she already had eight children. She had a tough time bringing up all of them, but the biggest tragedy for her was the death of the eldest daughter-in-law leaving behind a daughter. My periappa refused to marry the second time, and my granny undertook to take care of the orphaned daughter, Raji. Probably, to escape from the blame of doting and spoiling a motherless child, periappa had been extremely strict with her upbringing, and he refused to educate her after SSLC. Paatti had to plead on her behalf to allow Raji to learn Hindi from the Hindi Prachar Sabhas that had been fairly common in those days. So Raji got to pass two examinations—Prathamic and Madhyama— the basic and the intermediate examination conducted by the sabha.

But trouble was brewing, and granny had to take a fair share of the blame for the trouble.

It so happened that Raji developed friendship with a boy working in the printing press next to the sabha, and later, the friendship turned to love. The four-letter word had been an anathema to periappa. Periappa raised a big furore, but paatti rose to the occasion.

Paatti did some quick background check, and said the boy was ITI-trained, had no bad habits, performed diligently the daily pujas, and went to temple regularly!! ‘Love is not a dirty word, and all our gods had only a ‘love marriage’. Raji has indeed made a wise selection,’ she convinced her son.

Wasn’t that much like the grandmother of ‘Yuga Sandhi’ —a short story by the famous Jnanpith award winner D. Jayakanthan where the protagonist, the grandmother, fights with her son to permit his widowed daughter to remarry?

Years later, I asked her about what she thought of ‘Agni Pravesam’, another story by Jayakanthan. I asked her opinion only after my marriage, as I could never openly talk to her about sex before that. That was a story in which an innocent, simple girl (probably ‘ignorant’ too— the story is written in early 60s), is sexually assaulted in a car in which she is offered a lift while returning from college on a heavily raining day. The hapless girl tells all to her mother, but the pragmatic mother refrains from creating a scene, gives her a total body bath, instructing her daughter to consider it as purification by fire, and not disclose anything to anyone.
 
My granny said, “What else can be done? Kill the girl? Would that undo anything? We have to face every problem. But yes, sometimes you have to understand that not everyone has the same level of maturity.”

Very practical. I could not have got that answer from a person younger or more educated than her.