Rida Jaleel
In this essay, the author weaves a beautiful tapestry of thoughts, emotions and anecdotes around the wonderful persona of her grandmother.
It was in the winter of 2023 that the alarm bells tied around my grandmother’s neck first began ringing in all earnestness. My eighty-five-year old paternal grandmother was admitted to the hospital owing to a sudden dip in her strength, sending a ripple of trepidation across her massive family. In early 2024, those abroad, which included my father and I, were given an explicit warning by those with her that if they were to come visit her, this would be the time. We knew what it meant.
While there was nervousness, there wasn’t any surprise. My grandmother, wrapped perennially in a yard of exquisite white cotton loosely draped around as a saree, had been bed-ridden for as long as I can remember. For over a quarter of a century, this woman had helmed every household she’s ever been in from the head of her bed, owing to a case of brittle bones and a general sickliness that pushing out ten children at the prime of her life can’t have helped. My earliest memories of visiting my paternal Tharavaad—ancestral home—were all bookended by the sensation of the hard, wooden bed under my thighs as I sat by her, her hand in mine. Make no mistake; the bed was the only thing that was hard about our interactions. Everything else was indelibly soft; her little hand in mine, the curve of her smile, her worn saree between my fingers, the gaze that spilled out of her clarion eyes behind those comically large square glasses that used to make me laugh. A softness that would put all the satin in the world to shame. A softness that had tumbled down the years and had taken permanent residence in every thought of her that would ever bud in my mind.
In eighth grade, we happened to read a short story by writer Khushwant Singh, an excerpt of which nearly made me yelp in recognition:
“My grandmother, like everybody’s grandmother, was an old woman. She had been old and wrinkled for the twenty years that I had known her. People said that she had once been young and pretty and had even had a husband, but that was hard to believe… her silver locks were scattered untidily over her pale, puckered face, and her lips constantly moved in inaudible prayer. Yes, she was beautiful. She was like the winter landscape in the mountains, an expanse of pure white serenity breathing peace and contentment.”
“But that’s my grandmother!” All my life until then, I had foolishly believed that I was the only one who had her. But now it turns out, everybody did, even a random author I knew I wasn’t going to read twice. Did we all have the same grandmother? Did my grandmother sneak into Singh’s house and pet his head like he was a petulant cat, too, when we weren’t looking? Did she slip in and out of my friends’ lives, handing them wrapped candy and pickle jars and wide, benevolent smiles? It was a funny thought, to imagine her fulfilling the role of universal grandmother, the grandmother of all grandmothers; an eternal Santa of cushioned conviction and cotton sarees.
My grandmother, while a fierce Muslim, is also one of the oldest feminists I know. Nothing is more important than one’s education, a certitude that had perhaps fueled forth a family consisting almost entirely of doctors. When I had chosen to go the writer route, it was difficult not to snag my summer holidays on the barely-visible thorns of derision and judgment that emanated from many in my paternal family. But not from my grandmother, never from my grandmother. She had taken my hand in hers and said, her voice an indictment to all those who dared tease me, “It doesn’t matter what you do, it just matters how you do it. Literature or Laparoscopy, if you do it well, you’re golden.” The verdict was down; I was acquitted. To write was perhaps not as noble as to cure, but it deserved the same amount of respect, as did every other profession. In a small South-Indian town, when even a stone’s throw away might seem insurmountable, she would advocate for her grandchildren to go to faraway cities to gain an education. She’d chide over-protective parents and bat for us, while we’d sit frozen, unable to muster much of anything, let alone zeal.
In February of 2024, after things took another small turn for the worse, I booked an emergency flight to India. I was a bag of nerves, scooping ladle after ladle of broth into my mouth at the airport lounge, trying to sedate the tendrils of anxiety in my stomach with soup. I simply didn't know what to anticipate. Truth be told, in all twenty-five years of my life, nobody had ever enlisted me with the task of bidding adieu. The texture of goodbyes had evaded me entirely—a privilege I now recognise to be unprecedented, not to mention rare. What if I treat the meeting with too much frivolity, with too little? What if I say the wrong thing or burst into tears at the wrong moment? Worst of all, what if my despair bores the others—the older aunts and uncles and neighbors whose lives had, no doubt, been sanded down by their fair share of misery and illness? Here comes fresh-faced, wide-eyed Rida from abroad who has never seen a C-PAP machine before, who would probably balk at the sound of an enema.
When I met her that night after more than a year and a half, she cast a glance at me from afar. The stoicism melted away from her features, and her mouth pulled to reveal a gummy, denture-less smile. I relaxed; she recognises me.
"You look like someone I know," She said, her thin index finger planted on her chin, "You're a composite of so many faces I know. Come visit me when you're in my town."
It might seem exaggeratedly poetic when translated to English, especially for a woman in her eighties who resides outside the borderlines of language entirely, most days these days. But Malayalam, my mother tongue, the only language my grandmother knows, is a language of commonplace affections. Here, every act of recognition is a sonnet, every reunion, a rendition. My insides sank at her response but I bit my lip in an effort to float her a grin.
“Who do you think I am, Ummama?" I asked, coming closer.
"You're the duty nurse, aren't you?" She said, turning her head away. By then, she had been at the tail-end of so many hospital visits that she had developed a general sense of tiresomeness with those who were paid to keep her alive. What am I holding on for? A question she'd asked me so many times before. Each time, the answer would rise in my mouth like the swell of a tide. For us. You're here for us. But I was always afraid to say it. What if she looked at me, clarion eyes turned the colour of slate with cataracts, and picked at the strands of selfishness that were tangled in my attempts at comforting her? But that's what I've done my whole life; be here for you lot. It was a silent exchange that took place between us each time she'd ask me it, the words making its way into the atmosphere without either of us having to say them out loud, like invisible inflatable balloons, assuming a life of its own as the rest of my family watched.
She would not have been wrong. My grandmother has given birth to ten children, in a neat sequence of three girls, three boys, three girls, and the youngest, a boy, knotting the end of their family like a cherry stem. My aunts and uncles were serious, established individuals save my youngest uncle who, despite being well into his thirties, never quite succeeded in shucking off the mantle of being the baby of the family. Indulgent and ridiculously funny, he is the eternal life of the party, the kind of person you'd want in your car on a road trip. I've often thought that if an alien that didn't speak English descended down to earth and asked me who a 'hoot' was, I'd point towards Uncle F. On the days that were particularly hard for my grandmother, her body fighting against its own restraints, it was this uncle of mine who would help take her mind off things. He would poke and prod at her like a little child would, forcing the mother in her to resurface, remembering briefly, who she had once been, before all of this. He would tease her and make fun of her and infuse the room with the comic relief that, perhaps, all of us greatly benefited from.
In her better days, my grandmother was the sleeping empress of an entire room full of alluring treats. Having children scattered all over the Middle East ensured that each visit home is embellished by the import of large packets of special oatmeal, the Digestive biscuits she so loves, glossy tin after tin of Quality Streets and packs of Snickers milk chocolate to be washed down by giant bottles of Horlicks and Boost. My grandmother ruled over this empire of enchantments entirely from her bed, a commonwealth she kept alive not for herself but for the subjects around she dearly loved. Occasionally, a grandchild in knickered shorts and a threadbare T-shirt would catch sight of the bright plastic from a candy bar and would buzz around her bed, shy snaggle-tooth grin in hand, until she'd shake her head and roll her eyes. "What will I do with you?" She'd grin, straining to reach under her bed for the box of chocolates.
In all my years, I have never seen my grandmother enjoy a treat herself from the menagerie she managed— and I knew why; these were her betting chips in an economy that consisted of a whopping twenty-seven grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren. This was her language of affection and control. It was how she would say Think of me on your flight back to Dubai / Sit down and do your math homework / You should build yourself a house when the market’s ripe / Do not give your mother grief / I love you, don't ever forget that. When my sister last visited her, we had graduated from candy and knick-knacks. My grandmother had slipped on her hand two thin gold bangles; one for me and one for her. For your marriage, this one said, one I might not be here to witness.
You don't realize the follies of childhood until you grow out of them. How when you're young, you imagine strength to look so much like the pop of muscle that sprouts on Popeye's arm any time he downs a can of spinach. You equate power with the sneering, leering grin on a corrupt politician's face that shows from a flickering TV screen. Majestic-ness is always brushed in an undertone of unreality and beauty had never seemed more skin-deep and sluiced in unattainability. But suddenly one day, the slender, thinning frame that seems to be eaten away more and more each time you visit her seems to carry with it something akin to grace, the gentleness and the piercing clarity and the resolute absolution of my grandmother's kindness, her fierce resolve to give, give, give, to be a good Muslim, to be a good mother, to be a good sister, to be a good human being, the hunched figure riddled with a medical belt for her posture for as long as I can remember who can never seem to walk away from a tired vagrant at the door…these are all the references to loveliness, to magnanimity, to sublimity, that I will ever need in this life of mine.
Did we all have the same grandmother? Did she slip in and out of my friends’ lives, handing them wrapped candy and pickle jars and wide, benevolent smiles? It was a funny thought, to imagine her fulfilling the role of universal grandmother, the grandmother of all grandmothers; an eternal Santa of cushioned conviction and cotton sarees.
Maybe in a world in which she didn't exist, I would still be the same. But there would be something amiss; a spectacular identical clone that some mad scientist rendered but forgot to animate to life; some fundamental, gaping ravine in my own intelligence and understanding of the world through which everything that makes me me could easily slip through.
On her better days, my grandmother was a model patient. She was kind and obliging to the duty nurses, she entertained the doctors with endless cheerful stories and songs, often slipping into long lines of obscure poetry, face falling when she’d get the words wrong. On these occasions, she’d look at us as though for a script, and we’d scramble on our smartphones, rifling through the internet for the rest of the verses to help her along, failing. It was in these moments that we’d stumble upon the collective realization that who lay before us isn’t just the reason we’re alive, but also the provenance of so much poetry and proficiency; an entire archive of erudition and wisdom, so much of which existed before technology, that would we would lose forever with her. My grandmother had always prided herself in her lucidity and intelligence—both intuitive and social. People visited not just because she was memorable, but because she remembered them—the dates of their weddings and the subjects their children were majoring in and the ailments in their family. Being confined to her bed for more than two decades meant that she developed a voracious appetite for the outside world that she would appease through compulsively following the news and by skimming our own vocabulary and stories about the happenings in our lives. Through the portal of an old hand-held radio, she would consume news—both local and international—often stunning us by casually remarking about the Budget or the elections in the United States—subjects we’d shy away from for fear of exposing our own ignorance.
Since the last year or so of my grandmother’s declining health, she had taken to the staunch belief that she had had a child that we were hiding from her. So strong was this conviction that she would spend hours weeping for this baby of hers that didn’t exist, alternating between pleading and screaming at us to take her to it, depending on the day. She would speak of her parents and her husband as though they existed, words tumbling out in astounding clarity. If it wasn’t for the others, I would have been convinced that it was I who was losing my mind. She’d ask us to cook rice the way her father liked it, to de-husk coconuts in order to cook payasam in anticipation of her husband’s arrival. “Tell him I will be good for him. Tell him I will be good.” She’d mumble to me, holding my hand, and I would nod, unsure if she was referring to my grandfather or my great-grandfather. It wasn’t so much that she was bringing these characters, now dead for more than nearly half a century, into the present; she was being transported to them. Her mind was a cassette player, and each morning, somebody would slip in the tape of the past.
She would cry for her child, desperate to reach it before some harm befell, flaring in irritation at our confusion and apathy. For us, it was equal parts heart-wrenching and comical; the prospect of her pushing out a newborn child out of her eighty-five-year-old body that can barely stomach the distant thought of some rice, but to her, it was a devastating failure in her agency and ability to convey. It was an impossible demand—a baby that didn’t exist—but it was also her reality. What can be said about the grief of a mother? And is reality anything more than the monopoly of the majority? Does fifteen of us vehemently denying this baby to a woman who had spent most of her adult life carrying the weight of a child against her body like an impression on sand ameliorate that misery, that suffering?
“I just want to feed this child good things. I just want to educate him.” She would cry. You already did. We would respond in a chorus, Look around you. Here is a roomful of people who were fed and clothed and educated by you. Look how glorious.
But when these don’t work, we go back to bartering with reality again. Her children promise her a glance of her baby if she agrees to take in some more food. They humor her fumbling sentences about this child—her eleventh—in the hopes that she’d put up less of a fight while changing her diaper later on. When one of her younger grandsons, a bright-eyed Professor of Forensic Pathology, once rebuked the others for confounding an already disoriented grandmother with more stories of nothing, his mother, Aunt M, without looking up, candidly remarked, “You come here once a month. You won’t be saying this if you’re here all the time.” He sat back down, chastened. I did, too. It was an edict that the young were perhaps too young to realize: When it came to illness and grief, morality and truthfulness seldom had a role to play. What’s moral is getting your mother to drink another spoonful of soup. What’s truthful is getting her to want to live another day. And those that stay know this. Only they do.
My grandmother's second child, Aunt M, was one of the first doctors in our little town. So renowned and intuitively brilliant was she at what she did that the signboard that proclaimed her little clinic adjacent to our Tharavaad is still a landmark in our hometown, despite the fact that she'd moved out years ago. Aunt M, with her grave, handsome face and head scarf, is someone I can't help but love and fear in equal measure. The inherent nobility of a life dedicated to aiding people's ailments had made her an expert in tussling with my grandmother's; it emanated out of her like a cloak made of silver, both drawing in and repelling familial affection.
Aunt M is a daughter but she is also a mother, a grandmother. One evening, I caught sight of her jostling her three-year-old grandson on her hip at the hospital, his gooey smile forcing her to doff some of that gravitas, when it struck me how tenuous this whole thing was. I traced the clump of gray at her temples with my eyes, took in the sight of her curled, arthritic fingers, and wondered how it must feel like to come to terms with one's mortality while also witnessing the slow closing of your mother’s. Age, then, seemed like an impossible riddle to me, it was a ruse as impenetrable as anything else in life, always one step ahead of us. One day I would be sixty-seven, perhaps bouncing my own grandchild on my hip as I watched my mother being hooked to her third IV for the day, this moment in the present nothing but a blip in the canvas of the past. But no matter how old I’d be, I’d never be as old as her, or my grandmother, or my father. I would never know the things that they did, never wade through the rivers of their own nebulous pasts, never truly estimate the thoughts that ran through the crook of anybody's mind in that room. My grandmother could use her words, her tears, her gesticulation to spell out the grainy quality of her days, of her pain, but she would always be walled in on the bordered enclosure of her time on earth—we all would. Isn't it a miracle then, that despite all these blips, despite the bounding differences in age and upbringing and experience, despite the fact that our individual existences would always be encoded in a language slightly stilted from the tongues of those around us, we are still here together, milling about this literal (and metaphorical) hospital room that is life, united in our separate vagaries if but for a moment? Isn't it something that we're all here together, looking over the boulder of our own personal pain and into the courtyards of those around us, shaking the star-apple trees of our joys and jubilation, of our diseases and disconsolation, to share with others? We've been trained our whole lives to believe that this is something commonplace, a right more than anything, to have our family understand us and see through our heartache, but I saw then, just how much was really standing in the way of that, and I understood it for the act of resistance that it really was; love.
Sometimes, my father would drop casual scraps of information about life in his childhood. These anecdotes would be so strikingly, rip-roaringly heartbreaking—not so much because it was traumatic but it because it seemed so steeped in a childish innocence that tugged at me—that it would occur to me how inside my quiet father's brain is a little city that carries the landmarks of his boyhood that would elude me for as long as I am to live. It was a map I could try to piece together by collecting anecdotal evidence and relentlessly quizzing my extended family about, but the true contours of it would always be out of my bounds; my father is my father only from the day he became my father. Who he was before did not belong to me or my mother as I could barely picture him, young and boisterous, with a cigarette dangling from his lips or making a crude joke on the college grounds with his mates. This is perhaps for the better, I surmised. I don't think I could have taken seeing my father that way, with more written for him than just what he has now. Could someone have cashed in the chips of their youth and carefree-ness to then go on and have me as their first-born, to excavate a lifetime of dreams to build a foundation of financial stability? If someone had opened a portal for him that day on the college grounds, showing him what his future consisted of, would he still have made the calls he did, would he still have made those gambles? Who is to know? All I'm saying is that when L.P Hartly said that the past is a foreign country, he probably meant it as a good thing. Sometimes losing the key to a door is a blessing even though we might not feel that way in the moment.
That night, I dreamt of a young version of my grandmother sitting next to me; nimble, beautiful, in her early twenties, still in that white cotton saree (although I knew that this was a sartorial choice she had adopted after her husband's passing). I imagined the kind of stories she'd have to tell, frivolous dollops of femininity and sweetness outside the pre-ordained fences of child-rearing and maternity and household chores. If we had managed to subtract the past sixty years of her life, what would that girl, eight years my junior when she had had her first child, have to tell me? It kills me to think of how much precious womanhood is lost to the harsh, humdrum realities of the real world, every day.
But, all things considered, the atmosphere in the hospital room was far from miserable. In the week I was there, I had lost count of the number of people who had come to visit my grandmother. Sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, partners of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, her friends, their friends, the neighbors, the Muezzin of our town mosque… maybe this was why people had large families back then. Without glorifying the back-breaking labor it was for a woman to birth and rear ten children at a time when epidurals didn’t exist, I could acknowledge that maybe these were the fruits of her labour; this eternal revolving door filled with the bright noise of people that came and went. So much ceaseless chatter that one couldn’t feel alone even if one tried.
I have to insert the obvious reality here that money did, in fact, make everything easier than it was. Obviously, it did. It softened the perforated edges of my grandmother’s illness and enabled all of us to be kinder to each other than we would have been in the absence of it. When her first hospital room began to feel stifled with the daily influx of visitors, we shifted her to a larger, better room—an executive decision that took all of three seconds to make. It did occur to all of us that it wasn’t our own tenacity that prevented the sordid drudgery outside from piercing into our bubble of chit-chat and chai with hospital biscuits that tasted like old cardboard, it was financial security. While Uncle F regaled us all in yet another hilarious anecdote about our grandmother that he, no doubt, exaggerated for comedic effect, Uncle J blared all her favorite songs from his hand-held speaker. Uncle S helped lead her in prayers, while Aunt B and Aunt M teased my grandmother about her husband—their father—poking fun at him with grins on their faces to deliberately get a rise from her. Aunt Y would feed her mashed rice with a plastic spoon while Aunt N would recite to her from a frayed copy of the Qur’an. It was a privilege to just watch; an entire orchestra, strings and woodwinds and percussion and brass, all simultaneously rising to the task of smoothing the final symphony of my grandmother. Each, falling effortlessly into their ordained role, seamlessly weaving with the other until what emerges is a tapestry of the life my grandmother must have once led. I think of all the things people say about those at the end of their lives. I think that if my grandmother is at the twilight of her life, there are no better colours to render these days like the pinks and purples of a winter sky at dusk. I imagined her brushed in the broad strokes of friendship and motherhood and love and companionship from a village full of people—her own and otherwise.
I am not that old, but I am old enough to understand that love is not always sublime and pure and beautiful. The terrifying sorrow I feel at the base of my throat when I listen to a piece of Malayalam poetry, that too, is love. The clutching fear that I won’t make it back in time to see my grandmother one last time, that too, is love. The harkening reality that when it is my turn, the number of people crowding around in my hospital room will be fewer than the number of fingers in my palm, that too, is love. The pit in my stomach when I realize that I won’t just be losing my grandmother but my father’s mother, too, rendering him an orphan in this world, that too, is love. All of these painful, ugly addendums, too, are subsets of love. And if missing any of these might mean that I might not know and celebrate my grandmother as much as I do now, then I don’t want to do it. I will feel it all; the pain and the dejection and the loneliness and the little-girl feeling of being lost at a county fair. In Good Grief, Imelda says, “To avoid pain is to avoid love.” It is only now that I am truly able to understand what she means.
The last time I spoke to my grandmother, her beautiful, crinkled face had graced my phone screen as I listened to the babble of my aunts and uncles speaking over each other, around her. She frowned, the screen turning glitchy for a moment, before she laughed a gummy laugh. “The pretty nurse!” She cackled, “When will you come visit my hometown?” I join her laughter. “You do remember!” I play along, realizing that it’s one of those days. A wave of sorrow rises in me and, for a moment, I am unable to speak. “So familiar. Such a composite of faces I know.” I grin again, this time with feeling. As far as my grandmother’s concerned, this is the first time she’s told me this. But she will never know the gift of those words. Today I’m a nurse, tomorrow I’ll be somebody else. It is theater that breaks my heart but one I’ll gladly play for her. I may not have mastered the texture of goodbyes, but I have the language of making her stay.
So that is what I will do.
Rida Jaleel, 25, is a writer and editor who finds herself particularly drawn to the point where culture intersects with the written word. After briefly dabbling in rudimentary poetry, it was only in high school that she discovered a small flair for prose as well. Since then, her life and career has been a whirlwind of choices based entirely on this passion. After her eventful Post-Grad, she continued to write short and long stories, inspecting love and longing against the backdrop of all the cities she's lived in. She self-published a novel in 2016—What Lies Beyond.
Her work has been published in the Rathalla Review and Breakbread Magazine amongst others.
Note: Photographs provided by the author.
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