Daadi

"If you don't come back from London after two years, I will cut you up into tiny pieces and have them thrown into the well right here."

With the most dead pan expression possible, my grandmother said these words to me the last time I saw her. And I laughed. 

She meant the threat but she didn't mean the killing. If you didn't know her, you'd be worried, but after having spent about two decades getting to know her, I knew she was hurt at the prospect of my being that far away from her. And that's probably the only way she knew how to show it. But then again, under other circumstances, in another time, she might just as well have carried out the threat. And that thought doesn't bother me. I'm not going to explain this. You're free to assume what you will, because assume you will anyway, but if anything, my grandmother taught me how to live a better life.

That's the thing about her. She was not just a person but a personality; the kind that I've never otherwise come across in my life.

She was a woman of substance.

Self educated in a family that didn't think it important to school their girls but made sure the boys went on to become doctors, she knew Indian religious texts inside out in the way you'd expect Sanskrit academics to. She could dissect their meaning for hours on end and was revered by every religious scholar and pundit that ever crossed her path.

From a humble village to a massive house in the city, she made herself the woman she was without much help from others. She and my grandfather, they put together every brick of this house with more than just concrete and sweat. Her sons were her pride. She raised them to be incredible men, my father being one of them.

It is true that she was proud of having begotten only sons and not daughters and that she may have loved my brother a little more than she loved me, but that doesn't make me cringe anymore. When I think of how she was raised, when I try to put myself in her shoes, I realise that her greatness was not in the social conditioning that she couldn't leave behind but in that which she did.

She fought her battles and won where it mattered the most to her. She did what she believed was right. She was opinionated and defended her beliefs till the very end. She was a fierce spirit and will be remembered that way always.

She was what I'd call a badass woman.

It is easy for me to type out articles about sexism in our society, especially rural India, and how women perpetrate these notions, and talk about people from the generation of my grandmother as if they weren't good enough to teach us anything simply because they didn't believe in what we today consider to be a fundamental aspect of living.

But it is enriching to have actually lived with someone like her, to have discovered her past and thus understood her present and taken from her all the invaluable lessons that I have, because she lived a life more real than my air conditioned city life will ever get.

So today I miss her screaming my name across the hall because I didn't wake up early enough. I was awake today. She was asleep. She passed away at 10.12 pm on 16.02.2016.

And she will be sorely missed by everyone who knew her. Because good or bad, her persona filled up the lives of the people she knew with so much more than just another relation or human presence. She lived a spectacular life, the kind I'd make a movie about if I could. She inspired me to do the same and I can only try.

No one will ever match the grandeur of her ways. She was loved, tooth and nail, and heart and soul. And will always be.

Rest in peace daadi. (Though chances are she's already the centre of all attraction in afterlife and has made it interesting for everyone there. Peace maybe. Incredible lovely ruckus, sure).