Granny tales

SOCIETY

"Was she famous?" asked the man from the advertising agency. "Because if that's so", he went on, "people opt for a big picture. But if the relatives are famous, they like to put their own names in a larger fontsize."

We were discussing an obituary "" my grandmother's, who had passed away a day before, and a phone call to a leading newspaper had resulted in this man from the agency, with a tie-up with the paper, turning up at our home.

He was armed with a laptop, some layouts (to help select words, fonts, column inches) and a calculator, because, after all, space was being sold to us at premium ad rates. "No..." I mumbled, "not famous." May be exceptional, or that's how I see her and that entire way of life that has passed on.

My granny, Swaroop but also Raji, was fond of dressing up in brilliant white kurta-pyjamas as a child, she once told me. Her father, Abbaji, who served with the Scindias in Gwalior would be invited to men's-only meetings at the palace but took his beloved younger daughter along often "" dressed up as a boy.

She loved these outings and the chance they offered to explore private chambers and lives, being never afraid of transgressing. At home, however, it was a stricter upbringing. Raji and her older sister would be woken up at four every morning with a glass of milk and a handful of nuts soaked overnight and then expected to practice classical music for at least an hour.

The girls would take turns wielding the tanpura and singing ragas until it was time for school, to which they would proceed on a tonga. While Raji's older sister was much the lady, as also the family beauty, she herself would not conform and would tell the tongawallah to sit at the back while she took over the reins.

Still in her teens, she took over the running of the household but not in the sense that we may imagine today. She made decisions: If she foresaw a shortage because of the war, she ordered several hundred metres of fabric to last the family the entire year, and when she decided to collect her own trousseau, she made sure that she got the best, including a dinner set set aside for the royal family because no one else could use their colours then.

She studied in a hostel, kept a car (and a chauffeur) for excursions with friends (many survive to this day), and a personal cook. And when she saw my grandfather, a young officer with the railways, she decided to marry him "because he was so good-looking", though Abbaji was not entirely happy.

In short, she was spirited. It was a spirit that served her well. It enabled her to make reasonable success of her life as the wife of a bureaucrat "" she threw herself in the whirlwind of social activity; club events, ghazals, dramatics, musical soirees and cards sessions, so much so that her children needed to post her notes if they wanted to tell her something.

No one felt neglected. It was the same spirit that held her through 20 years of a crippled existence, fighting one debilitating disease after another, but retaining her cheer and immense will power so that we never saw her as helpless.

Instead, she bent others to her will. Sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren.... I, for one, learnt music when I'd rather have read books because I could not disappoint her. Eventually,

I did. By turning down marriage proposals, one after another, summoned up by her "" and she did have considerable energy for match-making. On the day I went to tell her that I'd be marrying a part-Muslim, the family was convinced of calamity. My grandmother, with a deep suspicion of the Other, would not survive the shock, they warned. She surprised us all. Snorted with nonchalance and "gave me away". There was magnanimity too.

In the obit, we finally put the photo, not names. "How do you spell bereaved?" asked the ad-guy. "Do a spell-check," I instructed. How do you feel it? That night, as I slept, I thought of her sleeping with my slippers under her pillow in Benares, so that when I woke up on a cold morn, I'd find them warm. I'll never see her again.