My grandmother is visiting. This time it will be different. For one thing, she is one year older, more frail and for the first time probably the one in need of looking after. She has been suffering from vertigo and it doesn't seem possible that her trip alone by train can be incident-free though we will be thankful if it is.
It is. She has avoided eating or drinking and therefore the need to go to the bathroom. She is not noticeably less able than last year but that is probably a lifetime of taking her energy for granted. I have never seen my grandmother ill.
Amma says different. She has recently talked about Nani's nervous breakdown back when Amma was in her teens. She can't remember much about it. Only that Nani used to shiver in the Mettur night and need blankets. Everything else about this time is a blur in Amma's mind, either because she was in college at the time or because she has the blessed ability to foget many, many things. At any rate, it seems to have followed a time when my mama - my mother's brother - was il with several dificult diseases and needed constant nursing. Nani must have been a taut string stretched beyond bearing at the time. I want to know what her 'breakdown' amounted to, beyond the shivering and the blankets.
Should I ask? I want to know, not out of some vulgar curiosity - well, not entirely - but because this is probably the last time she will make the trip to Hyderabad. She is 84. How many things will go unsaid and unremembered when she does? How much can I ask and how much does she want aired at this point in her life?
And what would be the point?
But I want to know what a woman roughly the age I am now, felt after severe stress. What was it like then, when people in general and women in particular did not acknowledge that the mind could only take so much? How did this entity we can find no place for in the body but which cannot exist without it - how was this thing healed and how did people know it was sick?
*
Yesterday at the station, Amma was restless, waiting for the train to arrive. Though the display told us what platform and what time, she still prowled and looked for someone who would tell her with some more authority, the trains' coordinates.
Later, she moved downstairs for the next few weeks and I could hear them talk - mother and daughter - far into the night. Lying there, listening to the murmur of voices coming through my windown, I was conscious of feeling a little desolate though I couldnt say why.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Should I ask?
Hell yes. I don't have either of my grandmas around but I sure wish I had asked them more questions.
What was it like then... ?
Oh God, that's the question I've always wanted to know. How the hell did that generation of Indians cope with deaths, disease, poverty, dislocation, floods, famine and still find it in their hearts to read the Ramayan every morning. How?
Like I said, please do ask. And if it's not too personal, please share.
It's hard to ask, I'm realising. *sigh*.
but that generation dealt with death reasonably well because the forms of mourning were prescribed and it had both and end and a continuation. we no longer allow ourselves the power of ritual to comfort.
I am trying to imagine her breakdown.
And her talking late into the night with her daughter.....
Do ask her whatever you can, Is her memory still sharp?
My father's is, mostly, mother's is like a sieve.
dipali: that's a hard question to answer. like anyone else, there are things she remembers very clearly and some things she doesn't. but yes, she's sharp and active. touch wood.
Post a Comment