Dadi

Dadi, my great grandmother, was a child widow; a fifteen year old left with an infant daughter. She was luckier than most. She had an affectionate father who was willing and able to care for her and her child. But her hair was chopped off, she had to wear a single piece of white cloth, she had to give up fish and meat and fast every fortnight. Thereafter, her role in life was to reduce to a minimum the space she occupied in the universe and, once her father was dead and her daughter suitably married, be at the service of every relative who needed a nurse or a nanny. Of course there was no question of her inheriting any of her husband’s property. (Her relatives were not particularly cruel or unfeeling. Those were, and had always been, the rules for widows; and the relatives were regular, god-fearing, rule-abiding people.)

Dadi and I lived in the same house for a couple of years, the house of her daughter, my maternal grandmother. You could tell she had been a beauty; she still was with her delicately molded features and bright eyes. “Could you scratch my back darling?” she would say to me. I ran my nails carefully over her withered skin, not wanting to break its papery surface while she told endless stories about her bodo-mamababu (older maternal uncle) and chhoto-mamababu (younger maternal uncle). I don’t remember even one of those stories .. but dadi held those venerable gentlemen in great esteem, so they must have been kind to her once.

While my grandmother was of a melancholy turn of mind (she would sit all evening with her hand on her cheek after her day’s work was done), her mother was like a sprightly bird. Her best friend, Debi’s mother (that was her name) called every evening to take dadi to the temple. As soon as Debi’s mother’s voice was heard, dadi would perk up and be downstairs in a flash. They were like two little girls going out to play. By the time she got back, darkness had descended, lamps had been lit, and children, hands and feet washed, were quietly doing their homework. She would stop by my chair and put a shred of holy basil from the temple in my mouth.

I didn’t see her too often after we moved from that house. She moved somewhere else too, to yet another relative’s place. She died when I was in college.