As I mourn, I think I need an impressive memory of my maternal grandmother to remember her by. All I keep thinking of are her homemade lime and mango pickles.
This is unfortunate because I do not know her recipes. Although I can guess the ingredients from memory, the intricacies of pickling are unknown to me. Every summer without fail, we would go to her house and grab the repurposed Protinules glass jars filled with tangy pickles. And then back home, my mom would make triangle rotis with salt and carom seeds that we would savour with the sour delights. I remember that my brother loved her anardana-intensified lime pickle and that I was partial to pickled raw mango. I would eat the flesh and studiously avoid biting into the whole peppercorns. Undoubtedly, the early 90s were pretty wild for tiny me.
Memories are trickier to untangle when you have had an eventful, challenging childhood. As best as I can recall, she wasn’t effusive in her love. She chose to be generous instead and I remember her taking my mother and I to the market for shopping. It would be frocks or small trinkets, and she even supervised my ears getting pierced and bought me my first earrings. I had cried rather loudly after my right ear had been pierced, and my grandmother had voiced her anger at the man perpetuating the horror. If it did any good, I do not know; it made the man nervous and my left ear piercing is unalterably a little awkward.
I suppose she thought it would have been useless for her to sit me down and meticulously impart all the wisdom of her years. I was never the right age, I assume, for her to share with me her journey from Rawalpindi to Kanpur and finally to Delhi; her childhood in Kanpur and being pampered by her four brothers; her early years of marriage and the stresses of having four daughters until a son and then another brought respite; marriage of the first daughter and the unexpected death of the second; birth of the first of her grandchildren and then another couple of decades of marriages and celebrating grandchildren; tragic death of her second son and estrangement from her youngest grandson; and the death of her husband and subsequent mellow years. But I was the eldest granddaughter, I would have understood. I wouldn’t have judged, I would have understood.
I sometimes imagine that I was a disappointment to her. No, I do not have grandmother issues, I am certain of it. She was far too diplomatic and easy-going to give me any real grief about my shortcomings directly. “Why do you need to buy her so many books,” she would ask my mother about me. She would tell me off when I pestered my grandfather for stories and interrupted his afternoon siesta. She sometimes asked me to write down phone numbers for her in her address book. “Your mom has neater handwriting than you,” she would tell me. She was a talent with the sewing machine and made dresses for her young children, taking pride in that her children were always smartly dressed and that one or the other daughter had learned to sew, knit, or crochet. I cannot knit or crochet and do not know how to make pickles.
Dear Badi Mamma,
I am sorry. I do not know why I am being a snob and feel that I need to search for a shiny memory to remember you. I am grateful for all the little memories. You should have shown me how to make pickles though and not let me believe all these years that grandfather loved me more. Thanks for showing my mother how to make triangle rotis. She taught me and now I know too. I enjoyed the pickles.
Loads of love,
Nidhi
