This past week, visitors to the family house described my mother-in-law as “elegant” and “gentle” and “gracious” and a “great lady of her time” to which, had she been around, she would have reacted with a rude word. Actually, make that rude words — of which she knew several. She rarely suffered fools, never leant her ears to sycophants, and the least you could accuse her of was hypocrisy.
My wife’s attempts to tame her were largely misplaced. The maid that attended to her at home was under orders to change her into a fresh saree every morning, but her mother would insist on traipsing through the house in her housecoat. If you banned her from the living room on account of bad behaviour, she would ruin it by sneaking in alongside the guests. She would kick off the uncomfortable sandals that had been provided for her and replace them with rubber slippers, much to my wife’s embarrassment.
My aunt-in-law said at her age she should take the lord’s name, for which she was unceremoniously ticked off. As much to shock her relatives, she refused to bind herself to the duplicity of widowhood: slurping her raw egg at the breakfast table much to the disgust of our children, enjoyed her fish and chicken, resorting to stealing from their plates if we attempted to control her diet, turning intemperate with the cook for saving the choicest bits for others, and not above demanding her bit of flesh if the fare on the table was – horrors! – vegetarian.
“My dear,” she would call her daughter’s friends, or “my lovely child”, winning their hearts, saving her racier, riper observations for members of the family. In the evening, when she wanted her tot, she would join me demurely over the first, unleash an acid tongue with the second, and impatiently knock on her glass if you didn’t provide her with a third — often asking guests for a refill while avoiding her daughter’s eye, reconciled to the inevitable clash that would follow. She was cantankerous, unapologetic and irredeemable.
Before she was hospitalised in Pune, too weak to speak for long on the phone, she said she was missing her evening drink — though her son had neither the stamina, nor indeed the heart, to deprive her of her victual pleasures. Hooked on to life support, she slipped in and out of consciousness. “What she needs,” I said to my wife, “is whisky instead of saline in her intravenous drip,” which might have done more to revive her than any doctor’s medicines. Her daughter’s response of choice invectives showed she had inherited at least her mother’s colourful language, which I had heard when my mother-in-law upraided my father-in-law — more regularly than I care to remember.
“Don’t worry,” I joked with my wife, “nasty people always live long,” but I suspect my wife does not have a sense of humour. Frail of body but stout of mind, my mother-in-law refused to let go, strung up and suspended by tubes and pipes for two long months, hoping perhaps for one last snifter. In the end, though, she proved not nasty enough, so when my brother-in-law and I raised a toast to her memory, I can swear she was bending her elbow alongside both of us. Leaving Pune for Delhi last night, there was a storm brewing in the sky, some thunder, a flash of lightning. Something tells me it was merely my mother-in-law telling off my father-in-law for not being ready in her new home with a tumbler of Scotland’s finest.