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Sylvia Khan

Of grandmothers and gene pools

My grandmother is coming to visit. An imperious Tamil mami, who, at 86, has her mind and body temple in better repair than others a fourth her age. A practising Hindu and aware each second of her upper class status, she has no patience with grandchildren who have married unmentionable individuals with names like Ali Akhtar. She bestows her presence on us a couple of times each year, only to keep an unwavering eye on the children, whom she adores and who adore her right back.

When she visits, I quake and double check every last household detail and my husband Zafar departs for far-off lands on nebulous and, I suspect, baseless business trips.

To the casual onlooker, this might seem to be extreme behaviour. Speaking as the insider, I know it's not. Paatiamma (grandmother) is one of those women who is truly awesome. She has never been to school a day in her life, but reads fluently and writes a fair bit of Tamil. She learned the alphabet by glaring at the newspaper and demanding that her husband teach her what she couldn't intimidate out of the paper.

She's ruthlessly efficient, a magnificent cook and can sing and play the veena almost to professional performance standards. She can even sew. Though not a traditional beauty, she has a commanding presence and can never be mistaken for anything less than what she is -- a force. Naturally, she fills me with the most overpowering feeling of inadequacy. This is only to be expected, everyone is inadequate compared with her.

Her morning drill would send rishis (holy men) scurrying for cover. She wakes up long before any normal person would dream of getting out of bed, has her bath and starts her pujas (worship) at dawn. Then she makes the most heavenly smelling coffee in the world and, having fortified herself with her morning cup, looks around for victims.

She usually sights me. A difficult task, since she has to walk all the way to the other side of the flat, bang on my door and then extricate me from many layers of protective cover.

"Why, paapa (baby)," she says with a broad grin, "I thought you'd be wide awake. Come on, get up. I've got the most wonderful coffee for you."

"Paati, I don't drink coffee anymore. What time is it? Four?"

"Naughty girl! Its six o'clock, time for all good mothers to be in the kitchen, making a good, hot, nourishing breakfast for their children."

"They eat cereal!" I groan.

"Not while I'm here, they don't," she smiled firmly. "Come on, get some nice upma (a savory breakfast dish made of wheat granules) going, they can have idlis (steamed rice cakes) tomorrow."

I groan my way out of bed, creep into the kitchen and yawn around the shelves, looking for the ingredients, usually buried in the depths, to make a sort of upma.

I watch with increasing awe, as she transforms something that I would have slung into the garbage, had I seen it, into steaming hot upma, with the flavor of childhood.

As the children straggle in for breakfast, the aroma of a fresh cooked meal embraces them.

"Ahh! Paatiamma's cooking!" they groan happily.

"Oh, Paati, you're going to slaughter me with your cooking!" my diet-on-the-brain teenage daughter says happily.

"Mama never makes all this for us," they say, unaware of any injustice done.

"Your Mama is a good girl "she says, while I do a "What's that?" with my eyebrows. "She looks after you very well. If she wasn't married to That Man, who knows what she might have become. As it is, he made her a housewife, with innumerable children to tend."

"You did it, Paatiamma," they say affectionately, aware of the respect they owe her.

"That was generations ago -- this is now, almost the 21st century!" she retorts.

"Zafar didn't insist on my being a housewife, Paati," I said. "I wanted to. Someone had to look after this lot! And I like it; I enjoy caring for them."

"My child," she said, "you could have been anything you wanted -- look at you, so talented, so clever... and what do you do? Keep house! It's all that man's fault."

I began to understand why Zafar was rarely in town when my grandmother arrived!

I also understood her frustration at my apparently callous disregard for the kind of opportunities Paatiamma herself had possibly coveted as a younger woman. Worse, I had opted for what must seem to her to be a kind of bondage.

"It's all right, child," she said. "You must fulfill your own destiny." This, in a voice which clearly implied a destiny that left much lacking. "With all that you've studied, don't you ever feel you would like to do something else?"

"She said once that she wanted to be a shop-keeper, Paati," one of the kids piped up, ever helpful.

"A common shopkeeper!" she said in tones of superb contempt. "No one in our family can ever do that! We are thinkers, scientists, acharyas (teachers-cum-counsellors) -- no child, you can never do that!" Firm as the Himalayas. And as unshakable.

"I hope you are not going to influence your children to become hopeless nonentities," she said.

"Paati, no one can make my children into anything other than what they themselves wish to be."

"And that's the way it should be," she said. "Ayesha can become a doctor, the twins can be engineers. The others are young, they can decide on their future later," she said, quite unaware of what she was doing.

"Paati, the twins are interested in setting up a business, and Ayesha is interested in music," I said. "Paati, leave them alone, everyone can't be Amma (mother)," -- that was my mother, her daughter. A driven career woman, she was the actualization of her mother's, and perhaps her own, dreams. She was a doctor, a scientist who was published in every major journal of medicine in India and abroad. A brilliant mind, and an interesting parent, she had given her only child a taste for science, literature and large families.

"What are you doing as their mother?" she demanded. "How can you just sit there and watch them ruining their lives?"

"Paati, they are not ruining their lives," I protested. "They are extremely intelligent, supremely strong-willed, articulate people who know what they want and, importantly, what they don't want. Zafar and I have brought them up to be individuals, with you and Amma encouraging us from the wings."

"Weak!" she said sadly. "You're weak. God knows where you got it from. All the women in our family have been strong!"

I looked at her as she sat there -- imposing, a statue carved of teak. I gazed at the bright eyes, the etched lines on her wonderful face and the disappointment in her curved shoulders. I loved that tough and vulnerable woman and was unutterably proud of her and all she stood for. There really wasn't a lot to say. I certainly wasn't weak. I was just strong enough to go ahead and do what I wanted to do with my life, however politically incorrect it was. I had also decided to give my children that privilege.

My grandmother was right. The gene pool won everytime. All the women of our family were strong.

Illustrations: Dominic Xavier