A life worth telling

My grandmother’s great wish for me is that I become a writer and chronicle our family history. This is also my mother’s greatest fear. Every time I mention the word publish she shudders involuntarily. Let sleeping dogs (and skeletons) lie. So, on balmy summer nights, with stomachs full of mangoes, ammamma and I would remember the ancestors, who still leave ectoplasmic footprints around the old family house (now carved up like the Chinese Melon), muttering to themselves in Malayalam in their flat, pharyngeal voices, and spraying chewed up betel leaves into brass spittoons.

A series of Grandmothers- Mutthis- feature in these stories, Grandmothers who's husbands names are not invoked, as if they were Amazonian queens. Grandmothers coping with tradition, Grandmothers coping with the Raj, grandmothers coping with communism, Grandmothers coping with modernity, Grandmothers battling and overcoming illness, Grandmothers winning their many small wins and suffering their many great defeats. A great pantheon of heroic grandmothers, of an obscure branch of the snake-dynasty, that finally whittles down to me. My mother, naturally not asleep, would sneer and scold us for that sort of nonsense talk, for filling up my head with these stories, polluting my aspirations of becoming a 'serious young woman', with that of becoming a great, story-worthy, story-writing Grandmother.

Who do you think you are? Arundhati Roy?

So the stories were kept in my head, to be taken out when it was time to write them down. It got me into a habit of collecting stories. This is a very simple habit to cultivate; all you have to do is listen and then keep safe. These days I try to spell them out into paper, but thats when I realize, they're no longer in words.